Books

Books : reviews

Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, Eleanor Rosch.
The Embodied Mind: cognitive science and human experience.
MIT Press. 1991

The Embodied Mind provides a unique, sophisticated treatment of the spontaneous and reflective dimension of human experience. The authors argue that only by having a sense of common ground between mind in science and mind in experience can our understanding of cognition be more complete. Toward that end, they develop a dialogue between cognitive science and Buddhist meditative psychology and situate it in relation to other traditions such as phenomenology and psychoanalysis.

Evan Thompson.
Mind in Life: biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind.
Harvard University Press. 2007

How is life related to the mind? The question has long confounded philosophers and scientists, and it is this so-called explanatory gap beween biological life and conciousness that Evan Thompson explores in Mind in Life.