Mind & Life Europe Podcast
A podcast by Mind & Life Europe that explores the continuity between mind and life through interdisciplinary dialogue. It features conversations with researchers and practitioners from science, philosophy, art, and contemplative traditions. The podcast emphasizes exploratory dialogue, radical candor, and listening as a way of knowing.
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A Symphony Without a Conductor: Agency, Emergence, and the Transdisciplinary Legacy of Autopoiesis
Bruce Clarke and Martin Rosenberg met back in 1989 in a meeting of the Society of Literature and Science. More than 35 years later, they came together again as panelists at the 2026 Barcelona Power & Care Conference, co-hosted by Mind & Life Europe and the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Both came from literature departments in an era in which high theory was a defining feature of literary studi
Constellating Care in a Precarious World
Speaking with Andrea Hiott was very much akin to moving through a dynamic constellation of ideas and watching that constellation shapeshift in real time. Hers is an intellect that dwells in paradox, that embraces movement, and that does not shy away from friction. Almost immediately, one is struck by her unbounded curiosity and refreshing humility, as well as the astonishing breadth of her thinkin
Season 4 Trailer: Empowering through Caring
Welcome back, dear listeners. In Season 4 of The Enactive Fold, we are "Empowering through Caring." You can learn more about our 2026-2027 programming theme on our website. If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community. Thank you for your support!This trailer was produced by Jonny Drury, and our music
“A question of wisdom”: Improvisation, Ethics, and the Permeability of Being Alive
Stephen Nachmanovitch is widely known as a musical improviser, and wise teacher of improvisation. But his is an improvisation not separate from life; it is more that of a Zen master’s, tuning into the microscopic contingencies of everyday life, probing life itself as the ground for creativity and wonder. His earliest beginnings as a scientist, and later a student of psychology and scholar of Willi
“Sitting with the Drift”: Imagination, Speculation, and Reenchanted Futures
Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser are forces to behold. As they describe themselves, they are “an artist duo whose work combines poetry and music to conjure speculative futures and multiverses.” Their collective, which you’ll hear more about in our conversation, is “Hylozoic/Desires,” or H/D. H/D “aspires toward a flat ontological ether in which all forms of life—stone, spirit, machine or
“Hope is a Stance”: Ecology, Aesthetics, and Pluralities of Reason
What if we began to think of reason as plural — reasons or reasonings — rather than the monolithic "Reason" from on high? What would it be like to think with all five senses, going beyond our habitual ocularcentrism? What if affect were both disruptor and the source of our greatest inflexibility? What role does ritual have in metabolizing the whole spectrum of human affect, both individu
"Rhizome of Relations": Unfolding the Potential of the Modern Museum
In the highly regulated spaces of most museums today, is it possible to enact a different type of experience, one that is relational, participatory, and even aspirational? Can the public be just as important as the artist and curator in the process of making an aesthetic experience meaningful? Museum director Karen Grøn believes so. And she has made it her mission to make the Trapholt Museum of Ar
"Ambush of Amazement": Ethics, Meaning, and Music with Legendary Poet Jane Hirshfield
In the words of Jane Hirshfield, “science exists to try to answer the questions that can be answered. Poems exist to answer the questions that cannot be answered and yet require of us some response.” Her poems do just this, but with the dexterity and finesse of a Zen koan. Jane is an unusual voice in the landscape of contemporary poetry, in that she has spent much of her life as a serious practiti
Season 3 Trailer: Introducing "The Enactive Fold"
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 infor
The Somatic Dance: Curating a Life in the Midst of Breakdown
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 have
Knowing-in-Connection: Improvisation as Praxis for Life and Art
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 Renaul
Learning Laterally: Unsettling the Normative Gestures of Pedagogy
“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
An Enactive AI? Computing and Sense-Making Beyond the Data-Driven Approach
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 th
Beyond Healing: New Narratives for Making Sense Together
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
Atopos: Neurodiversity and the Power of Participatory Sense-Making
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 m
Enactive Ethics: Difference Becoming Participation
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
Opening Up the Space Between Us
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 experti
Season 2 Trailer: Knowing, Being, Doing
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 ho
Phenomenology in the Making (part 3 of 3)
[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-phe
(Im)mersive Epistemologies in Physics, Philosophy, and Buddhism (part 2 of 3)
[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-phe
A Community of Minds (part 1 of 3)
[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-phe
“The Blind Spot": Opening up Our Understanding of Human Experience (part 2 of 2)
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
Coming Into One’s Own as an Enactive Thinker (part 1 of 2)
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
"Epistemology Matters" (part 3 of 3)
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
Epistemophilia: The Pleasure of the Search (part 2 of 3)
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
Not Two Minds, But One Mind (part 1 of 3)
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
Season 1 Trailer: Opening Up the Space Between Us
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 listening
