A podcast by Mind & Life Europe, emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of our co-founder, the Chilean neurobiologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, these conversations are one more way of exploring what has been the lodestar for our work at Mind & Life Europe: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.”
Mind & Life Europe is a home for unconventional interdisciplinary encounters, where researchers and practitioners enrich one another in their understanding of mind and life, through the rigour of scientific inquiry, the openness of philosophical investigation, the edginess of artistic exploration, and the depth of contemplative wisdom traditions. We believe that holding an open-hearted and interdisciplinary space of dialogue is in itself a radical, ethical mode of being-in-the-world, which generates new pathways of research and collective sense-making with transformative potential.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A podcast by Mind & Life Europe, emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of our co-founder, the Chilean neurobiologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, these conversations are one more way of exploring what has been the lodestar for our work at Mind & Life Europe: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.”
Mind & Life Europe is a home for unconventional interdisciplinary encounters, where researchers and practitioners enrich one another in their understanding of mind and life, through the rigour of scientific inquiry, the openness of philosophical investigation, the edginess of artistic exploration, and the depth of contemplative wisdom traditions. We believe that holding an open-hearted and interdisciplinary space of dialogue is in itself a radical, ethical mode of being-in-the-world, which generates new pathways of research and collective sense-making with transformative potential.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 during the final session of our Core Enaction, Semester 4, where we focused on the ethical core of participatory sense-making, with care or non-indifference at its centre. Here, we revisit some of those themes, but with an eye to how we might practise participatory sense-making, how it has more personally influenced each of these thinkers, and what traction it might have for concrete challenges in the world today. We importantly unpack some of the subtleties of participatory sense-making as it was originally laid out, in both its conceptual and experiential aspects. In the broadest sense, the conversation brought us back to some fundamental questions about the ethical drive behind the activity of theorising, and the ongoing circulation of knowledge and practice, of the ontological and the ethical.
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