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The Embodied Mind
Thompson, Varela, and Rosch's 1991 landmark — the founding text of the enactive approach to cognition, synthesizing cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhist philosophy.
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, published by MIT Press in 1991, introduced the enactive approach as a systematic alternative to the computational and representationalist paradigms that dominated cognitive science. The book integrated three intellectual traditions — the autopoiesis theory developed by Maturana and Varela, the phenomenological analysis of embodied experience developed by Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, and the Buddhist philosophy of mind developed in the Madhyamaka and Yogācāra traditions — into a single framework in which cognition is reframed as the activity through which an organism brings forth a world of significance through its embodied engagement with its environment. A second edition appeared in 2016 with substantial new material reflecting three decades of subsequent development.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The book's reception unfolded slowly. Its arguments against the computational theory of mind were initially treated as philosophical speculation by mainstream cognitive science, but its empirical productivity — the research programs it generated in enactive cognition, embodied cognition, and neurophenomenology — established it over two decades as one
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