About
Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy and Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. With Francisco Varela and Eleanor Rosch, he co-authored The Embodied Mind, the foundational text of enactivism in cognitive science. His subsequent works — Mind in Life, Waking, Dreaming, Being, and Why I Am Not a Buddhist — weave together phenomenology, neuroscience, and Asian philosophical traditions to argue that consciousness cannot be understood apart from lived experience. His most recent book, The Blind Spot (2024, with Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser), challenges science's tendency to ignore the experiential ground from which it operates.
Key Contributions
- Co-authored 'The Embodied Mind,' helping launch enactivism as a bridge between cognitive science, phenomenology, and Buddhist thought
- Developed the life-mind continuity thesis in 'Mind in Life,' arguing cognition grows out of living self-organization
- Wrote 'Waking, Dreaming, Being,' connecting neuroscience, meditation, dream research, and phenomenology
- Wrote 'Why I Am Not a Buddhist,' criticizing Buddhist exceptionalism while still taking contemplative traditions seriously
- Co-authored 'The Blind Spot,' arguing that science forgets the lived experience from which inquiry begins
- His work resists both reductive neuroscience and romantic spirituality, a balance that makes it valuable but hard to categorize
Questions they sharpened View the streams
Books
Videos & Interviews
Moving Beyond the Blind Spot: Seeing what we don't see with Evan Thompson and Andrea Hiott
Conversation on the blind spot of science and why lived experience must be central to understanding
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Waking, Dreaming, Being | Dr. Evan Thompson | Talks at Google
Talk on self and consciousness through neuroscience, meditation, and philosophy
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The Blind Spot in Perception: Cognitive Science, Asian Philosophy, and Mystical Insight
Conversation with John Vervaeke exploring how cognitive science, philosophy, and mysticism converge
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Francisco Varela
CollaboratedBiologist, Philosopher & Neuroscientist
They met at a Lindisfarne conference in 1977 and later worked together at CREA in Paris; with Eleanor Rosch they wrote The Embodied Mind (1991), the book that made enactivism a serious option inside cognitive science rather than a critique from outside it. Varela brought autopoiesis and the biology of the living, Thompson the phenomenological training to ask what experience is actually like. After Varela's death in 2001, Thompson carried the program forward alone in Mind in Life.
en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org · The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (MIT Press, 1991)
Adam Frank
CollaboratedProfessor of Astrophysics, University of Rochester
Before the book there was an essay: in Aeon in January 2019, Thompson, Frank and Marcelo Gleiser named the Blind Spot. 'In the Blind Spot sits experience: the sheer presence and immediacy of lived perception.' The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience (MIT Press, 2024) worked the claim out at length, with the philosopher who had spent decades bringing phenomenology into cognitive science writing alongside an astrophysicist. Frank now carries the term into public debate as what 'my colleagues and I call the blind spot'.
aeon.co · en.wikipedia.org · lareviewofbooks.org · youtube.com
Anil Seth
DebatedProfessor of Cognitive & Computational Neuroscience, University of Sussex
In 'Reality is not a controlled hallucination' (March 2026) Thompson names Seth as the popularizer of a thesis he considers "bad philosophy" wearing the clothes of new science — one that "traces back to Hermann von Helmholtz" and remains "debatable philosophy from the nineteenth century." His central charge is a category error: perception belongs to the whole animal engaging its world, not to the organ doing the modelling. "Thinking that perception happens inside the brain is like thinking that flying happens inside the bird's wings." Seth has not published a reply. The disagreement is sharper for how much they share. Both tie mind to being a living body; both reject the brain-as-computer picture. They split on where experience happens — in the model the brain builds, or in the traffic between a creature and its surroundings — and that is exactly the question you must answer before you can say what, if anything, is missing in a system with no surroundings to engage.
iai.tv
Marcelo Gleiser
CollaboratedTheoretical Physicist & Astronomer, Dartmouth College
In 2019, the same year Gleiser won the Templeton Prize, he and Thompson published with Adam Frank the Aeon essay that named science's Blind Spot. Five years later they turned it into The Blind Spot (MIT Press, 2024). The pairing is the argument in miniature: a theoretical physicist and a philosopher of mind agreeing that what science cannot see is the experience it starts from, which is not a gap more data could close.
aeon.co · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org
