Mind & Life Europe Podcast

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in spreading the word: if you're enjoying these conversations and would like to hear more, please take a minute to  rate, review, follow, and download episodes . Much as we are loathe to engage in a culture of ratings and algorithms, we recognise that this helps new people find our work. Thank you for your support! Stephen Nachmanovitch...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in making the podcast more visible for future listeners: if you're enjoying these long-form conversations and would like to hear more of them, please take a minute to  rate, review, follow, and download episodes of the podcast  on any of the major platforms. Much as we are loathe to participate in the algorithm economy, we recognise...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in making the podcast more visible for future listeners: if you're enjoying these long-form conversations and would like to hear more of them, please take a minute to  rate, review, follow, and download episodes of the podcast  on any of the major platforms. Much as we are loathe to participate in the algorithm economy, we recognise...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in making the podcast more visible for future listeners: if you're enjoying these long-form conversations and would like to hear more of them, please take a minute to  rate, review, follow, and download episodes of the podcast  on any of the major platforms. Much as we are loathe to participate in the algorithm economy, we recognise...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in making the podcast more visible for future listeners: if you're enjoying these long-form conversations and would like to hear more of them, please take a minute to  rate, review, follow, and download episodes of the podcast  on any of the major platforms. Much as we are loathe to participate in the algorithm economy, we recognise...

Welcome back to the Mind & Life Europe Podcast — "The Enactive Fold" — in which you'll be hearing from thinkers, researchers, and creators, whose voices and work rhyme with the enactive approach to mind, life, and experience. To learn more, visit our website and do consider becoming an MLE Friend ! Thank you for listening; we hope you enjoy. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more info...

What does enacting the world look like for organisms who are not thriving, but merely surviving? What happens when we don’t have access to the activities that are organism-defining? How to curate a life from the edge , when one is cast out of the relational web because of illness or disability ? These are questions that Professor Shay Welch is asking herself today, and not because the questions ha...

This conversation was a rich and potent gathering of creative minds, whose lives and work have long orbited practices of improvisation, co-creation, and participatory sense-making: cellist and mindfulness teacher Barbara Bogatin , atypical choreographer and dancer Luc Petton , pianist and teacher of teachers Dr Scott Brewer , and our wonderful co-host from Core Enaction, Semester 4, Dr Letícia Ren...

“Transversal operations for the creation of ways of knowing emerge from the ground up. They are singular and speculative at once, emboldened by the creativity of the everyday. The mistake is to assume that what education needs is a model. What education needs is an opening for learning, an operative interstice for seeing beyond the map.” –Erin Manning, “Radical Pedagogies and Metamodelings of Know...

With few conversations did I feel the stakes to be so high, so thorny and complex. For this conversation on “Computing Differently,” I sat down with Dr Luc Steels and Dr Takashi Ikegami , two of the world’s preeminent researchers in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, and robotics — but researchers who come at the question of AI from a decidedly divergent perspective, that of t...

In no other conversation this season has the relationship between ontology and ethics felt more pressing and more pregnant. How we define a person, how we classify their suffering and needs, radically determines the different interventions we might choose, either opening up a space for healing or, inversely, creating further harm. This conversation about healing drew together three researcher-prac...

Few conversations have been as illustrative as this one of the proximity between participatory sense-making as a theory and participatory sense-making as a veritable way of moving through the world. In this episode, we hear from Allison Leigh Holt , Jonny Drury , and Dr Hanne De Jaegher about thinking divergently, and feeling oneself to be 'atopos' in a world where the neuronormative claims on the...

This episode features three remarkably engaged and engaging thinkers and collaborators. Dr Elena Cuffari, Dr Hanne De Jaegher, and Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo co-authored the magnum opus, Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity Between Life and Language in 2018, which was a much-needed extension of the enactive approach into the realm of language and intersubjectivity. We heard the three of them in dialogue du...

As an introduction to this new season of conversations, I sat down with Dr Hanne De Jaegher , who was the backbone of Semester 4 of our Core Enaction Programme . She is well known in the worlds of philosophy and cognitive science for her development - with Dr Ezequiel Di Paolo - of the theory of participatory sense-making , which grew out of the enactive approach and which takes seriously our expe...

In this second season of the podcast, we are prolonging an experiment of sorts that we conducted in the spring of 2024 in the Core Enaction Programme , our online learning curriculum. Over the course of eight sessions, we invited researcher-practitioners into an open space of dialogue to explore how their intersubjective practices might be informed and enriched by participatory sense-making , and...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to apologise about the production quality of this episode and some of our earliest episodes; this has been improved in subsequent seasons. We hope that you will enjoy the content all the same. My guest today is the brilliant multidimensional thinker Michel Bitbol, a rare mind that is as well versed in medicine and physics as it is in Buddhist philosophy and micro-ph...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to apologise about the production quality of this episode and some of our earliest episodes; this has been improved in subsequent seasons. We hope that you will enjoy the content all the same. My guest today is the brilliant multidimensional thinker Michel Bitbol, a rare mind that is as well versed in medicine and physics as it is in Buddhist philosophy and micro-ph...

[A note to listeners] We'd like to apologise about the production quality of this episode and some of our earliest episodes; this has been improved in subsequent seasons. We hope that you will enjoy the content all the same. My guest today is the brilliant multidimensional thinker Michel Bitbol , a rare mind that is as well versed in medicine and physics as it is in Buddhist philosophy and micro-p...

My guest today is Evan Thompson, known to many in the worlds of cognitive science, Asian studies, and philosophy, and one of the foundational figures in the story of Mind & Life Europe. Evan was one of Francisco Varela’s closest collaborators and co-authored with Francisco and Eleonore Rosch the now classic volume, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991, rei...

My guest today is Evan Thompson, known to many in the worlds of cognitive science, Asian studies, and philosophy, and one of the foundational figures in the story of Mind & Life Europe. Evan was one of Francisco Varela’s closest collaborators and co-authored with Francisco and Eleonore Rosch the now classic volume, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991, rei...

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and has been involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialised in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early ’80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the Universit...

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and has been involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialised in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early ’80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the Universit...

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and has been involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialised in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early ’80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the Universit...

After a careful period of incubation, we are thrilled to announce the official launch of the new Mind & Life Europe Podcast !  We are particularly excited because the intimate, conversational nature of podcasts lends itself to the specific tenor of our work at Mind & Life Europe (MLE), emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listenin...