Books HOME
New Books!
My new book, Mind in Life: Biology,
Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, is now available from Harvard University Press. Visit their webpage for the book
(and be sure to check out the review
attention page). To purchase from Amazon click here.
From the Preface:
The theme of this book is the deep continuity of
life and mind: Where there is life there is mind, and mind in its most complex
forms belongs to life. Life and mind share a core set of formal or organizational
properties, and the formal and organizational properties distinctive of mind
are an enriched version of those fundamental to life. More precisely, the self-organizing features of mind are an enriched version of the
self-organizing features of life. The self-producing or autopoietic
organization of biological life already implies cognition, and this incipient
mind finds sentient expression in the self-organizing dynamics of action,
perception, and emotion, as well as in the self-moving flow of
time-consciousness.
From this perspective, mental life is also bodily
life and is situated in the world. The roots of mental life lie not simply in
the brain, but ramify through the body and the environment. Our mental lives
involve our body beyond the surface membrane of our organism, and therefore
cannot be reduced simply to brain processes inside the head.
The chapters to come elaborate these ideas using
material drawn from three main sources—biology, phenomenological
philosophy, and psychology and neuroscience. The book as a whole is intended to
bring the experimental sciences of life and mind into a closer and more
harmonious relationship with phenomenological investigations of experience and
subjectivity.
The Cambridge Handbook of
Consciousness is now available
from Cambridge University Press. Visit their webpage
for the book.
This collection contains over thirty
chapters on a wide range of topics and issues in the scientific investigation
of consciousness. I have contributed three chapters, one on neurodynamical approaches to consciousness (with Diego Cosmelli and Jean-Philippe Lachaux),
one on phenomenology (with Dan Zahavi), and one on Indian theories of mind (with Georges Dreyfus). Here is a link to the
groundbreaking chapter on Meditation
and then neuroscience of consciousness by Antoine Lutz, John Dunne, and
Richard Davidson.
Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and
the Philosophy of Perception.
Routledge Press, 1995.
Francisco J. Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor
Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press, 1991.
Giovanna Colombetti and Evan Thompson, eds., Emotion Experience. Imprint Academic, 2005. Published also as a
special triple issue of the Journal
of Consciousness Studies.
The Problem of Consciousness. New Essays in
Phenomenological Philosophy of Mind. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 29: 2003. University of
Alberta Press.
Alva Noe and Evan Thompson, eds., Vision and Mind: Selected Readings in the
Philosophy of Perception.
MIT Press, 2002.
Between Ourselves: Second Person Issues in the
Study of Consciousness.
Imprint Academic, 2001. Published also as a special triple issue of the Journal
of Consciousness Studies.
