Thinking in Transit: Explorations of Life in Motion

by Edward S. Casey, Megan Craig

Overview

Does being in motion change how we think? Tracing the connections between thinking and transit—including walking, being transported by a vehicle, and many other modes—this innovative book shows how embodiment and movement deepen, expand, and transform creative thought.

Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey provide a collaborative phenomenological exploration of thought in motion, interspersing lively first-person accounts with broader philosophical inquiry. Their investigation, structured around the four ancient elements—water, air, earth, and fire—ranges across swimming, boats, balloons, planes, cars, trains, and other modes of transport. Craig and Casey invite readers to recall their own experiences of travel and how thinking changes in tandem with shifting environments and whatever conveys a person from place to place. They also consider how changing climates and evolving technologies, with new rhythms and materialities, have shaped human thinking in its many varieties.

Thinking in Transit celebrates forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines. This book urges a change in how philosophers have traditionally framed the setting for serious thought: from the austere, solitary space of a study to populated places of interaction and passage.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231221351
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	08/26/2025
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Megan Craig is associate professor of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as well as an artist and essayist. She is the author of Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology (2009).

Edward S. Casey is distinguished professor emeritus of philosophy at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and past president of the American Philosophical Association. His many books include Plants in Place: A Phenomenology of the Vegetal (Columbia, 2023), with Michael Marder.

Editorial Reviews

Thinking in Transit speaks to the heart of our transitory existence. In contrast to the picture of the solitary sedentary sage, the authors bring us on a wondrous journey through both the material elements—fire, air, earth, water which invite different kinds of movement—and the technological modes of transport (boat, train, car, plane) which mediate our multiple transitions. We are boldly reminded that some of our best thoughts are mobile, itinerant, searching—odysseys of both mind and body, where the imagination plays with nature and opens new paths of adventure. This is a brilliant and timely book, which speaks to our age of ecological and political crisis and keeps its readers always on the move.

Richard Kearney

From their form to their moving details, these essays slide between authors, across elemental fields, and in and out of vessels, from boats to swings to sleds. And along the way, we find ourselves invigorated by a transformed feel for where we’ve always been: on the move.

John Lysaker

In this exciting new work, Craig and Casey are sharing a singularly original project written in an exceptionally congenial style, interweaving personal recollections with wonderfully insightful philosophical ruminations. Historically considered, thinking is a pursuit that requires a solitary and sedentary life. But these two philosophers are challenging that paradigm, bringing thought back into the motion and emotion of everyday life.

David Michael Kleinberg-Levin

Captivating reflections from two thinkers who are also accomplished visual artists on the nature of water, air, earth, fire—the elements of existence in all their sensuality. The study develops impressions and insights about everyday existence in vivid detail as the authors travel via trains, planes, cars or even just inhabit gardens beyond the cloistered walls of academia. The play of their thoughts across diverse landscapes offers the rare pleasure of a deep but lightly worn erudition, and of a singular style of painterly thinking.

Cynthia Willett

Thinking in Transit is a deeply meditative book. Megan Craig's and Edward Casey’s voices—sometimes blended, sometimes separate—eloquently evoke the wonder and significance of everyday movement: swimming, falling, skating, and flying, just to name a few. I’ll never think of taking the ferry the same way again!

Shannon Sullivan