ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I offer ways of thinking about nursing practice as making soup. First, I discuss plurality, and implications of that term for recognizing the complex and dynamic nature of social environments of practice drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin. Then I discuss hermeneutic philosophy as a rich source of ideas about how discerning understanding comes about. Going beyond the language-based work of Gadamer, which has already entered nursing literature, I discuss more recent work by Kearney and scholars of enactivism to make understanding a matter of embodied cognitive activity through which human beings make sense of the world.
