Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind

The contemporary enactivism treatise, continuing the programme that Francisco Varela, Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch began in The Embodied Mind. Thompson argues that life and mind share a common pattern — autopoiesis, self-organisation, sense-making — and that cognition cannot be separated from the living body that enacts it. The book bridges continental phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) with systems biology and dynamical systems theory in a way that few works manage. Dense and foundational, it provides the philosophical infrastructure for understanding why cognition is not computation and why the organism-environment coupling matters more than internal representations.