Core Enaction: Semester 1

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialized 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 University of Paris 7, with a specialty in psychodynamic theory and practice, and in parallel, completed psychoanalytic training.

Dr. Luisa Damiano is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the IULM University (Milan, Italy), and the coordinator of the Research Group on the Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial (RG-ESA). Her main research areas are: Epistemology of Complex Systems, Epistemology of the Cognitive Sciences, and Epistemology of the Sciences of the Artificial. Since 2007, she has been working on these topics with scientific teams all across Europe and in Japan. Among her publications there are many articles, the books Unità in dialogo (Bruno Mondadori, 2009) and Living with robots (with Paul Dumouchel, Harvard University Press, 2017) and several co-edited journal special issues.

Following her doctoral work under the supervision of Francisco Varela at the Institute of Neurosciences (Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris), Dr Valérie Bonnardel pursued her research at the Experimental Psychology laboratory, University of Cambridge (United Kingdom). Her initial research work concerned the psychophysical aspects of colour vision in humans. She later developed interest in the study of cognitive and cultural aspects of colour, while heading the Research Chair at the National Institute of Design in India in 2011-12. She has been the Vice Chair and the Chair of the Colour Group Great Britain (2011-2014) and is today a member of the executive committee of the Association Internationale de la Couleur. In 2016 she developed a module for third year students on “Embodied Cognition and Contemplative Practice Studies” in the Department of Psychology at the University of Winchester.

Dr. John Protevi is Phyllis M Taylor Professor of French Studies and Professor of Philosophy at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge Louisiana (USA). He received his PhD in Philosophy from Loyola University Chicago in 1990. He is the author of Political Affect (2009), Life War Earth (2013), and Edges of the State (2019) all with University of Minnesota Press. He has a recent article in Frontiers in Psychology on Covid 19 in the USA as an “affective frame,” seeking to integrate enaction, stress physiology, and political analysis.

Dr. Bruce Clarke is Paul Whitfield Horn Distinguished Professor of Literature and Science in the Department of English at Texas Tech University. He has been a Baruch S. Blumberg/NASA Chair in Astrobiology at the Library of Congress; a Senior Fellow at the Center for Literature and the Natural Sciences, Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg; and a Senior Fellow at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy, Bauhaus-University Weimar. He coedits the book series Meaning Systems, published by Fordham University Press. His research focuses on modern literature, cybernetics and systems theory, narrative theory, and Gaia theory. His latest books are Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, coedited with Sébastien Dutreuil (Cambridge 2022), and Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (Minnesota 2020). Other books include Neocybernetics and Narrative (Minnesota 2014), Posthuman Metamorphosis: Narrative and Systems (Fordham 2008), and Energy Forms: Allegory and Science in the Era of Classical Thermodynamics (Michigan 2001). He is the editor or co-editor of seven essay collections, most recently Posthuman Biopolitics: The Science Fiction of Joan Slonczewski (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), and with Manuela Rossini, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Posthuman (Cambridge 2017).

Dr. Juan Carlos Letelier is a Professor at the Universidad de Chile. As a biologist, trained by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, he is interested in neuroscience (the anatomy and physiology of avian visual perception), theoretical biology, and the uses of science to understand human society. A central focus for him has been the formal study of the notions of metabolic closure (Autopoiesis, (M,R) Systems and Free Energy principle) within the framework of Bayesian Inference and Category Theory.

Dr. Tom Ziemke is Professor of Cognitive Systems at Linköping University, Sweden, where he leads the Cognition & Interaction Lab, which is part of the Human-Centered Systems division at the Department of Computer & Information Science. He holds a German diploma degree in informatics, a Swedish masters degree in computer science, and PhD from the University of Sheffield, UK, which he received in 2000, for a thesis on robotic and neurocomputational models of situated and embodied cognition. He was professor of cognitive science at the University of Skövde, Sweden, before moving to Linköping in 2015. His main research interests are in situated/embodied cognition and social interaction, with a current focus on people’s interaction with different types of autonomous technologies, ranging from social robots to automated vehicles. A long-standing research interest is the relation between cognition and computation – and the resulting (mis-) conceptions of AI among both researchers and the general public.

Dr. Evan Thompson is a writer and Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he is also an Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology (Cognitive Science). He works on the nature of the mind, the self, and human experience. His work combines cognitive science, philosophy of mind, phenomenology, and cross-cultural philosophy, especially Asian philosophical traditions. He is the author of Why I Am Not a Buddhist (Yale University Press, 2020); Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation and Philosophy (Columbia University Press 2015); Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology and the Sciences of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Colour Vision: A Study in Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Perception (Routledge Press, 1995). He is the co-author, with Francisco J. Varela and Eleanor Rosch, of The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991; revised edition 2016). He is currently working on two new books: Dying: Our Ultimate Transformation (Columbia University Press), and with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser, The Blind Spot: Experience, Science, and the Search for Truth (MIT Press). Thompson is an Elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a Past President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.