Abstract
This article aims to offer one introduction amongst others to performance philosophy: an emerging interdisciplinary and international field of thought, creative practice and scholarship open to all researchers concerned with the relationship between performance and philosophy, broadly construed. The article provides an initial outline of the field’s contributors, principle concerns and activities before going on to examine key debates including questions relating to expanded definitions of performance and philosophy, the relationship of the field to notions of disciplinarity and institutionalization, and the critique of the paradigm of application. The article proposes that there is an emerging consensus amongst researchers concerned with the relationship between philosophy and the arts that scholars must find alternatives to the mutual instrumentalization and disciplinary inequalities that arise from the application paradigm, or philosophy of the arts approach, that has historically dominated approaches to aesthetics and arts theory. Drawing from Laruelle’s non-philosophy, it goes on to consider the implications of the hypothesis that performance thinks, before closing with reflections on both the fields contributions and shortcomings, particularly in terms of reinforcing Eurocentrism.