Most of Shaun Gallagher’s Enactivist Interventions into philosophical issues about the mind are quite effective, but there are a few that could be improved. In what follows, we attempt to make two of Gallagher’s arguments more convincing. Our focus will be on Gallagher’s use of Francisco Varela’s “threefold distinction in temporal and dynamical registers” (Gallagher 2017, 8; Varela 1999). Gallagher uses this threefold distinction to address issues concerning what he calls the “causal-constitution fallacy” and issues concerning neuroscientific findings and free will. Gallagher is less convincing than he could be when he addresses these issues, because although he invokes Varela’s threefold distinction, he does not also provide a detailed story about how these “temporal and dynamical registers” relate to one another. We will provide a counter-intuitive, but empirically well-supported story about how the registers relate to one another, and, in so doing, improve upon Gallagher’s.…

Villalobos and Razeto-Barry suggest that extended enactivist interpretations of the autopoietic theory do not adequately address the bodily dimensions of living beings. In reply, we suggest that the extended enactivist view provides a richer account of living beings than a theory confined to autopoiesis, and therefore should not be supplanted by a modified autopoietic theory.

Key words: enactivism, autopoiesis, living systems