Publication 4379

Excerpt: Almost thirty years ago, in the summer of 1986 in Paris, Francisco Varela and I began writing what would eventually become this book. I was a first-year Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Toronto and Varela had just moved to the Ecole Polytechnique and the Institut des Neurosciences. We had met about ten years earlier in the summer of 1977 when he came to a conference at the Lindisfarne Association, an educational institute and contemplative community founded by my father, William Irwin Thompson. My father and Gregory Bateson, who was Lindisfarne’s scholar in residence that summer, led the conference, called “Mind and Nature.”{1} Varela in turn was a Lindisfarne scholar in residence in 1978. Living together at Lindisfarne in Southampton, New York, and Manhattan, he became a member of our family – a combination of uncle and older brother to me, as well as my intellectual mentor. That relationship was the context in which we worked together on The Embodied Mind in Paris from 1986 to 1989.