Mind & Life Europe Podcast

About Mind & Life Europe Podcast

A podcast by Mind & Life Europe (https://mindandlife-europe.org/), emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of our co-founder, the Chilean neurobiologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, these conversations are one more way of exploring what has been the lodestar for our work at Mind & Life Europe: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.” Mind & Life Europe is a home for unconventional interdisciplinary encounters, where researchers and practitioners enrich one another in their understanding of mind and life, through the rigour of scientific inquiry, the openness of philosophical investigation, the edginess of artistic exploration, and the depth of contemplative wisdom traditions. We believe that holding an open-hearted and interdisciplinary space of dialogue is in itself a radical, ethical mode of being-in-the-world, which generates new pathways of research and collective sense-making with transformative potential. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Publisher

Mind & Life Europe

Category

education · religion & spirituality · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Apr 2024

Latest episode

17 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

26 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   17 Sept 2026

   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 thinking. She is one of those thinkers who pushes us to hear familiar words anew, and reengage with descriptions of our world in a generative, non-reductive way. As you’ll hear in the beginning of the conversation, her work stretches across phenomenology, neuroscience, 4E cognitive science, urban planning, care ethics, and more, and she has elaborated a constellatory approach to thinking and being, which we explore, and at times enact, throughout our conversation. An important concept in Andrea’s work is what she calls way-making, which, in many respects, is a kindred approach to the enactive style of thinking. One of the central concerns in the way-making modality is how we can be specific and rigorous in our sense-making, while also keeping the horizon open and emergent. We need both: science that is rigorous about its protocol, agents who are clear about their positions and responsibility, and a space that is beyond representation and assessments, as well as a self-understanding that is inseparable from the environment. Way-making has a great deal to do with how we use our attention and what affordances that attention allows in our environments, and therefore with what matters to us and how we care. For her, caring is inseparable from movement. As she says, “the body mattering is caring towards,” and “the mattering is the body coming into being.” In this context, real power comes not from the sort of representational clout we witness in the world everyday, but from the very precariousness that generates our conditions for sentience. So, she asks throughout the conversation, what does it mean to live in a world that attacks this precariousness? How can we persist in a world in which multiple forms of ‘caring towards’ are in vehement competition with each other? How can we generate regularities and affordances that encourage and amplify caring? The conversation ends on a hopeful note, and not because we don’t acknowledge the many perversions of power in our world today, but because, as Andrea says, we are forever bound to each other, through our mattering and caring, and moments of disorientation are in fact opportunities for new forms of communication and agency. *** Andrea Hiott is a philosopher, author, and educator whose work moves across neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and embodied cognition. She has been working towards the navigational approach to cognition since 2017. She holds advanced degrees in philosophy and neuroscience from the University of Georgia, Humboldt Universität Berlin, and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and is currently a graduate researcher in the philosophy faculty (Phenomenology and Psychiatry) at Universität Heidelberg (https://www.klinikum.uni-heidelberg.de/en/zentrum-fuer-psychosoziale-medizin-zpm/klinik-fuer-allgemeine-psychiatrie/ueber-uns/sektionen/phaenomenologie/fuer-interessierte/doktoranden/). Her thesis presents the navigational approach. She is a part-time professor at various schools and universities, serves on the board for three foundations, and has worked as a ghostwriter for over a decade. Andrea is also a ‘philosopher founder’ of Making Ways (https://www.making-ways.com/) and the Love & Philosophy (https://www.loveandphilosophy.com/) project. Making Ways is a multimedia care collective and international community dedicated to philosophical inquiry across the usual bounds between disciplines, institutions, and ways of living. Link to Andrea's paper we discuss in the episode: "Radical Embodied Relation at any Scale, from Remembering to Navigating (https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s11245-025-10256-7.pdf)." *** If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation (https://mindandlife-europe.org/donate/) to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community (https://mindandlife-europe.org/join-mle-friends/). Thank you for your support! All of our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

2. 

   17 Sept 2026

   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 (https://mindandlife-europe.org/annual-themes/). If you'd like to support our work, including this podcast, you can make a donation (https://mindandlife-europe.org/donate/) to Mind & Life Europe or join our MLE Friends community (https://mindandlife-europe.org/join-mle-friends/). Thank you for your support! This trailer was produced by Jonny Drury, and our music is courtesy of Blue Dot Sessions. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

3. 

   25 Mar 2026

   “A question of wisdom”: Improvisation, ethics, and the permeability of being alive

   [A note to listeners] We'd like to ask for your support in spreading the word: if you're enjoying these conversations and would like to hear more, please take a minute to rate, review, follow, and download episodes. Much as we are loathe to engage in a culture of ratings and algorithms, we recognise that this helps new people find our work. Thank you for your support! 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 William Blake, have afforded him a uniquely integrative view on the power of play and permeability, on the Pythagorean mysteries of the human mind. Most of all, he was a student of the great systems thinker Gregory Bateson, a presence one can feel when speaking with Stephen, whether through his recounting of anecdotes, his love of silence and patterns, or his generous, playful ways of relating. This conversation was perhaps a bit unusual for those who know Stephen’s work well: it didn’t so much focus on his two masterful books, Free Play and The Art of Is, as on the many resonances between his existential understanding of improvisation and the central questions that animate the enactive approach: Why is creativity a key feature of living organisms? Are humans born improvisers? What makes it such that computers can’t play? What makes improvisation an eminently ethical exercise in equality, and a template for democracy? Are there limits to improvisation as a tool for living well in society? How do we navigate the many tensions inherent in improvisation, between agency and letting be, between the safety of a temenos and the boundarilessness of interdependence? How do we more finely tune our semi-permeable membranes, discerning when to open and when to close? Where can we look for those “Pythagorean hippies” (as Bateson called them) who are able to see, before the rest of us, the patterns that connect all of life? True to his mentor’s aphorism, “there are no things, only relationships,” this conversation was a generous exercise of relationality, humility, creativity, and wisdom. Dr Stephen Nachmanovitch performs and teaches internationally as an improvisational violinist and at the intersections of multimedia, performing arts, ecology, and philosophy. He is the author of two books on the creative process, Free Play and The Art of Is. Born in 1950, he graduated in 1971 from Harvard with a degree in psychology and in 1975 from the University of California, where he earned a Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness for an exploration of William Blake. His mentor was the anthropologist and philosopher Gregory Bateson. He has taught and lectured in many countries on creativity and the spiritual, social, and ethical underpinnings of art, and on Bateson’s ecology of mind. Since the 1970s he has been a pioneer in free improvisation on violin, viola, and electric violin. He has presented lectures, master classes and workshops at many universities and conservatories, and has had numerous appearances on radio, television, and at music and theatre festivals. He has collaborated with other artists in media including music, dance, theatre, and film, and has developed programs melding art, music, literature, and computer technology. He has published articles in many fields since 1966 and has created computer software including The World Music Menu and Visual Music Tone Painter. He has been a Buddhist practitioner for decades and his Buddhist and musical practices inform each other. He is currently performing, recording, teaching, and writing. He lives with his family in Charlottesville, Virginia. For more about Stephen’s work: www.imaginaryliberation.com (http://www.imaginaryliberation.com/) | www.freeplay.com (http://www.freeplay.com/) | https://youtu.be/t0bS-CcOYbQ (https://youtu.be/t0bS-CcOYbQ) Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy (https://acast.com/privacy) for more information.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.2 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

2 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 24 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

37

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

30

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.