Getting Physical and Philosophical with Jason Bender

Students in Who Am I? journeyed up to Andersonville’s Cheetah Gym to take an introductory jiu-jitsu class with Jason Bender of Bender Fitness. While the study of martial arts might seem miles away from our course on philosophy and psychology, we have already noticed some interesting points of overlap, not least in the fact that martial arts such as jiu-jitsu are founded upon centuries of social and physical philosophies. We might say, with the British empiricist David Hume for example, that we have never experienced safety — just a long sequence of impressions from which we have (miraculously?) emerged unscathed. Jiu-jitsu asks us to inhabit our bodies and our places in society more intentionally, so what we did was a kind of philosophy-with-the-body.