An Annotated Reading Guide
Using This Guide
The sources gathered here explore the questions behind Enacting Life: how living things maintain themselves, how their surroundings become significant to them, and what this means for understanding perception, action, and knowing. The guide follows several connected lines of inquiry, from Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition to later work on sense-making and agency, Uexküll’s account of animal worlds, and debates in neuroscience and developmental theory. The annotations explain what each work contributes and how it relates to the Enacting Life readings.
Start Here: Three Short Readings
These readings offer a shorter route into the ideas behind Enacting Life. Begin with the first; the others take the argument further.
Thompson, E. (2022). What Is Mind? Mind & Life Institute.
A roughly 15-minute introduction to living organization, sense-making, and the relational character of mind. This is the most accessible starting point in this list.
Thompson, E., & Stapleton, M. (2009). Making sense of sense-making: Reflections on enactive and extended mind theories. Topoi, 28, 23–30.
An eight-page paper on why an organism’s surroundings can have significance for it. More academic than the first essay, but useful for understanding the bacterium-and-sugar example and the connection between autonomy and sense-making.
Thompson, E. (2011). Précis of Mind in Life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18(5–6), 10–22.
Thompson’s own 13-page overview of the book’s central argument. It connects living organization with embodiment and experience; it is shorter than the book but still philosophically demanding.
For book-length treatments, The Tree of Knowledge offers an introduction to Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, while Mind in Life develops the broader account. The detailed guide below provides sources and further reading by topic.
Sources and Further Reading by Chapter
The lists below combine sources used in the readings with suggestions for pursuing their questions further. Inclusion does not mean that a work is cited or discussed in that chapter. Consult each reading’s References section for its own references.
Embodiment and Enactivism: Maturana & Varela (1980); Di Paolo (2005); Thompson & Stapleton (2009); Barandiaran, Di Paolo & Rohde (2009); Ward (2026); Reynolds & Baedke (2026); Villalobos & Ward (2015); De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007); Cummins & De Jesus (2016); Kirchhoff et al. (2018); Di Paolo, Thompson & Beer (2022)
Enacting Worlds: Uexküll (2010); Brentari (2015); Feiten (2020); Yong (2022); Gomez-Marin (2023); Lacalli (2022); Thompson (2007); Gibson (1979)
Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience: Lettvin et al. (1959); Maturana, Uribe & Frenk (1968); Maturana (1978); Maturana & Varela (1987); Brette (2019); Cisek (2019)
What Makes Living Things Different?: Di Paolo (2005); Moreno & Mossio (2015); Nave (2026); Ward (2026); Griffiths & Hochman (2015); Corris (2022); Jonas (1966); Cummins & De Jesus (2016); Di Paolo (2019)
Coda: Maturana (1978); De Jaegher & Di Paolo (2007); Dreyfus (1992); Barandiaran & Almendros (2025); Di Paolo, Cuffari & De Jaegher (2018); Middlebrooks (2026); Brette (2026)
Foundations: Autopoiesis, Cognition, and Enactivism
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. D. Reidel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8947-4
How can a living system continually change its components while remaining a living system? Maturana and Varela address this question through autopoiesis: the organization of processes through which a system produces and maintains itself. The volume includes Maturana’s 1970 report “Biology of Cognition” alongside work on autopoietic organization. It supplies the biological starting point for Enacting Life, including the distinction between organization and structure. This is a demanding foundational text; later readings in the guide develop its implications for sense-making and agency.
Maturana, H. R. (1978). Biology of language: The epistemology of reality. In G. A. Miller & E. Lenneberg (Eds.), Psychology and biology of language and thought: Essays in honor of Eric Lenneberg (pp. 27–63). Academic Press.
Maturana asks how language and knowing can arise among living systems whose activity depends on their own structure. His account of the consensual domain follows the development of coordinated conduct through recurrent interaction. The chapter also distinguishes how a system operates now from the history through which it came to be. It is central to Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience and provides a route into the Coda’s discussion of language and human relations. Readers encounter Maturana’s particular account of knowing, observing, and explaining.
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding (R. Paolucci, Trans.). Shambhala.
A more accessible entry into Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition. Their formulation “all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing” (p. 26) invites readers to consider knowing through what a living being can do within its relations with the world. The book helps explain the broad use of cognition in Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience. It also introduces the connection between biological organization and human understanding that runs through Enacting Life.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. MIT Press.
This book brings the enactive approach into conversation with cognitive science, lived experience, and action. Drawing on Maturana and Varela’s biological work, it broadens the inquiry toward how cognition can be understood from the perspective of embodied experience. It helps readers see how the biological questions emphasized in Enacting Life became part of a wider approach to mind. Compared with Autopoiesis and Cognition, it moves the emphasis from the organization of living systems toward lived experience and sensorimotor activity, drawing on Buddhist contemplative traditions.
Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life: Biology, phenomenology, and the sciences of mind. Harvard University Press.
Thompson develops an account of continuity between life and mind, bringing biological autonomy into conversation with the study of lived experience. The book gives extended attention to how a living system’s organization can ground a perspective from which things have significance. It is useful for readers who want to pursue the questions about sense-making raised in Enacting Worlds and What Makes Living Things Different? Its broader synthesis also helps locate the shorter papers on autonomy, adaptivity, and agency that follow.
Jonas, H. (1966). The phenomenon of life: Toward a philosophical biology. Harper & Row.
A philosophical account of organisms as beings whose existence depends on their continuing activity. Through metabolism, an organism exchanges matter with its surroundings while maintaining its identity, so its continued existence is always at stake. Jonas’s account informs later work by Weber and Varela (2002) and Thompson (2007). It offers philosophical background to the questions about metabolism, dependence, and self-maintenance explored in What Makes Living Things Different?
Other Strands of Enactivism
O’Regan, J. K., & Noë, A. (2001). A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(5), 939–973. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01000115
A central statement of the sensorimotor approach to vision. O’Regan and Noë propose that seeing involves practical mastery of how sensory stimulation changes with movement. Their argument connects visual experience with ways of exploring the environment, rather than with the activation of an internal picture. The paper provides a useful comparison with the biological strand followed in Enacting Life: its emphasis is on sensorimotor mastery rather than on autopoietic organization.
Hutto, D. D., & Myin, E. (2013). Radicalizing enactivism: Basic minds without content. MIT Press.
A sustained argument that basic cognition need not involve representational content. Hutto and Myin challenge the assumption that perceiving and acting must depend on internal states that represent the world as being a particular way. They distinguish basic cognition from forms of thinking that depend on sociocultural practices. Their approach gives readers a way to examine enactivist arguments about representation alongside the questions about living organization emphasized in Enacting Life.
Autonomy, Adaptivity, Sense-Making, and Agency
Weber, A., & Varela, F. J. (2002). Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 1(2), 97–125. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1020368120174
An important later attempt to connect autopoiesis with biological individuality and intrinsic purposiveness. The paper marks a development beyond the most austere early formulations of autopoiesis and helps explain why later enactivists became interested in normativity and teleology. Where Maturana and Varela’s early formulation kept purposes out of the description of living systems, Weber and Varela argue that autopoiesis grounds them.
Di Paolo, E. A. (2005). Autopoiesis, adaptivity, teleology, agency. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 4(4), 429–452. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-005-9002-y
A crucial source for the distinction between autopoiesis and adaptivity. Di Paolo argues that autopoiesis provides an important basis for talking about biological identity but is not by itself sufficient to explain the richer normativity involved in sense-making. Adaptivity describes regulation relative to conditions of viability. The distinction helps clarify what later enactivists added to Maturana and Varela’s account.
Thompson, E., & Stapleton, M. (2009). Making sense of sense-making: Reflections on enactive and extended mind theories. Topoi, 28(1), 23–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-008-9043-2
A concise account of autonomy and sense-making that is especially useful for the bacterium-and-sugar example. The paper explains why significance is relational: sugar is food because of the organization and activity of the bacterium, not because “food” is an intrinsic property of the sugar molecule.
Barandiaran, X. E., Di Paolo, E. A., & Rohde, M. (2009). Defining agency: Individuality, normativity, asymmetry, and spatio-temporality in action. Adaptive Behavior, 17(5), 367–386. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712309343819
The clearest source for the account of minimal agency used in Enacting Life. The authors identify three core conditions: individuality, interactional asymmetry, and normativity, and define agency in terms of an autonomous organization that adaptively regulates its coupling with the environment. The account belongs to later enactive work that builds on Maturana and Varela rather than restating them.
Moreno, A., & Mossio, M. (2015). Biological autonomy: A philosophical and theoretical enquiry. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9837-2
A book-length theory of biological autonomy centered on organizational closure: the constraints that shape a living system’s processes depend on one another for their maintenance. Moreno and Mossio develop this account across questions of function, agency, cognition, and evolution. The book offers a systematic theoretical background to the discussion in What Makes Living Things Different? of how living activity maintains the structures that make further activity possible. Read it alongside Nave (2026), under Current Debates.
Umwelt and Organism-Specific Worlds
Uexküll, J. von. (2010). A foray into the worlds of animals and humans, with a theory of meaning (J. D. O’Neil, Trans.). University of Minnesota Press. (Original works published 1934 and 1940.)
The primary historical source for Umwelt. Uexküll’s claim is stronger than the idea that different species merely detect different stimuli. An Umwelt is the perceptual and operative world of the animal subject, organized through what can be perceived and acted upon. Enacting Worlds draws on this idea while keeping it distinct from the later enactivist language of sense-making and from claims about phenomenal consciousness in organisms such as bacteria.
Brentari, C. (2015). Jakob von Uexküll: The discovery of the Umwelt between biosemiotics and theoretical biology. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9688-0
A careful historical and philosophical guide to Uexküll. It is useful for distinguishing Uexküll’s own concepts from later enactivist, phenomenological, and biosemiotic interpretations. It provides historical context for the discussion in Enacting Worlds.
Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin.
Gibson develops an ecological account of perception in which animals detect information in their surroundings through activity. His concept of affordances concerns the possibilities for action that surroundings offer an animal with particular capacities. This gives readers a useful comparison with the climbable and graspable surfaces discussed in Enacting Worlds. Read Gibson alongside Feiten, below, to explore connections and differences between ecological psychology and enactivism, including their treatments of information, significance, and organism–environment relations.
Feiten, T. E. (2020). Mind after Uexküll: A foray into the worlds of ecological psychologists and enactivists. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 480. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00480
A useful contemporary discussion of Umwelt and its relation to ecological psychology and enactivism. Enacting Worlds uses Feiten most directly for the point that the meaningful objects and spaces of an Umwelt ordinarily appear to the subject as objective reality rather than as a constructed or limited perspective.
Yong, E. (2022). An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. Random House.
A popular survey of animal senses, framed from the start by Uexküll’s idea that each animal lives within its own perceptual world. Enacting Worlds uses it as an accessible starting point and then asks what a catalogue of sensory capacities leaves out. Read it with the Gomez-Marin review below.
Gomez-Marin, A. (2023). Six impossible worlds before breakfast. Current Biology, 33(10), R386–R389. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2023.03.070
A review of Ed Yong’s An Immense World that presses the distinction between cataloguing animal sensory capacities and asking about the worlds of animal subjects. It is useful in Enacting Worlds as a contemporary invitation to take Uexküll’s question seriously, not as a primary source on Umwelt.
Lacalli, T. (2022). An evolutionary perspective on chordate brain organization and function: Insights from amphioxus, and the problem of sentience. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377(1844), 20200520. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0520
A comparative-neuroscience argument for resisting human-centered assumptions about what other vertebrate experience might be like. Its relevance to Enacting Worlds is deliberately limited: it supports caution about projecting human subjective organization onto other animals rather than establishing a general theory of Umwelt.
Neuroscience, Information, and Representation
Lettvin, J. Y., Maturana, H. R., McCulloch, W. S., & Pitts, W. H. (1959). What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain. Proceedings of the IRE, 47(11), 1940–1951. https://doi.org/10.1109/JRPROC.1959.287207
The classic frog-retina paper. It demonstrates selective responses in optic-nerve fibers to particular patterns of visual stimulation. The paper itself uses the language of stimuli, detectors, channels, and information. Maturana’s structure-determined reading of these findings, discussed in Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience, came later.
Maturana, H. R., Uribe, G., & Frenk, S. (1968). A biological theory of relativistic colour coding in the primate retina. Archivos de Biología y Medicina Experimentales, 1, 1–30.
The primary source for the color-vision work discussed in Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience. Maturana later described this work as important in his shift away from treating perception as the recovery of an independently specified external world (Maturana, H. R., 2002, Autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition, Cybernetics & Human Knowing, 9(3–4), 5–34). Reading the 1968 paper itself shows the empirical findings before the broader theoretical conclusions he later drew from them.
Brette, R. (2019). Is coding a relevant metaphor for the brain? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 42, e215. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X19000049
A contemporary critique of neural coding from theoretical neuroscience. Brette argues that correlations between neural activity and experimenter-defined variables do not by themselves establish that the nervous system literally encodes or represents those variables. Brette names Francisco Varela as a major early influence and Gibson as another, which accounts for the overlap with enactivist questions, though his framework is his own and differs from Maturana’s.
Brette, R. (2026). The brain, in theory. Princeton University Press.
A book-length contemporary argument against treating biological cognition primarily through engineering metaphors such as computation, code, control, optimization, and reverse engineering. Brette places the organism and biological organization back at the center of theoretical neuroscience. Especially useful for Enacting Life are his emphasis on living systems as processes whose material constituents can turn over while organization persists, and his move toward studying Paramecium as a whole behaving organism in an environment rather than interpreting isolated physiological signals. These arguments connect strongly with themes in the Coda and with developmental neuroscience, while remaining theoretically distinct from enactivism.
Middlebrooks, P. (Host). (2026, April 8). Romain Brette: The brain, in theory (Episode 235) [Audio podcast episode]. Brain Inspired. https://braininspired.co/podcast/235/
The interview is useful because Brette states several connections unusually clearly. He identifies Varela as an important early influence and Gibson as another major source, uses the example of a book to explain why information should not be treated as a substance contained in a signal, describes the apparent stability of cells as stability of organization amid material turnover, and explains why Paramecium lets him connect physiology directly to whole-organism behavior. He is also explicit that current AI is not thereby moving toward living agency, while remaining agnostic about whether a radically different artificial system could ever instantiate something comparable.
Cisek, P. (2019). Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 81(7), 2265–2287. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01760-1
Argues that the functional categories neuroscience inherited from psychology, such as perception, cognition, action, and decision, do not pick out the brain’s actual mechanisms. Cisek proposes rebuilding them by following the order of changes in evolution, starting from early organisms whose metabolism kept them within viable conditions through closed-loop control, and tracing how that control extended into interaction with the world as nervous systems evolved. It is the neuroscience counterpart of the point in Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience that an observer’s descriptions should not be turned into mechanisms. Two contrasts are useful. Cisek treats behavior as control, a metaphor Brette (2026) argues against, and his history is phylogenetic, so it fixes categories at the level of the species rather than what comes to matter in a particular life. His related work on affordance competition draws on Gibson.
Developmental Connections
Corris, A. (2022). An enactive-developmental systems framing of cognizing systems. Biology & Philosophy, 37(4), 32. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10539-022-09865-y
A useful bridge between enactivism and Developmental Systems Theory. Corris emphasizes their shared concern with organism-environment relations while also noting an important tension over how much explanatory or causal priority should be given to the individual organism. This makes the paper useful for connecting Enacting Life with About Development without pretending that the two frameworks are identical.
Di Paolo, E. A. (2019). Process and individuation: The development of sensorimotor agency. Human Development, 63(3–4), 202–226. https://doi.org/10.1159/000503827
Di Paolo connects autonomy, sense-making, and agency with dynamical and relational perspectives on human development. He develops a dynamical interpretation of Piaget’s equilibration and an account of sensorimotor agency based on self-sustaining relations among sensorimotor schemes. The paper also considers developmental variability and the role of adult–infant interaction in developmental change. It offers a direct connection between the questions pursued in Enacting Life and About Development.
Griffiths, P. E., & Hochman, A. (2015). Developmental systems theory. In H. Kehrer-Sawatzki (Ed.), eLS (pp. 1–7). John Wiley & Sons. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470015902.a0003452.pub2
A concise account of Developmental Systems Theory and its expanded treatment of inheritance. The developmental system is the matrix of resources required to reproduce a life cycle, not a genetic program supplemented by environmental inputs. This is especially useful for the developmental section of What Makes Living Things Different? and for keeping the relation between Enacting Life and About Development explicit without collapsing the projects.
Current Debates
Meyer, R., Stendera, M., & Russell, J. (2026). Prospects for the science of enaction: Introduction to the special issue. Adaptive Behavior, 34(4–5), 247–251. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123261469743
The editors’ introduction to a special issue in which enactivists take stock of the approach thirty-five years after The Embodied Mind. It argues that enactivism has not achieved the paradigm shift once hoped for and that its prospects are brightest when its ideas are integrated case by case into wider cognitive science. Useful as an honest orientation to where the field sees itself, not as a verdict on the ideas in Enacting Life.
Ward, D. (2026). What is enactivism? Adaptive Behavior, 34(4–5), 253–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123261450094
Argues that the usual way of dividing enactivism into autopoietic, sensorimotor, and radical strands hides what is distinctive about it. Ward proposes a different question: does the meaning of psychological states depend on information processing (“informationalism”) or on properties distinctive of living things (“organicism”)? On this map, the approach followed in Enacting Life is organicist. Ward also distinguishes properties characteristic of life, such as feedback and goal pursuit, which machines can share, from properties distinctive of life. That distinction underlies the argument of What Makes Living Things Different?
Villalobos, M., & Ward, D. (2015). Living systems: Autonomy, autopoiesis and enaction. Philosophy & Technology, 28(2), 225–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13347-014-0154-y
Compares autopoietic theory with later enactivism and argues that the two offer different accounts of living beings. Focusing on autonomy and organizational closure, Villalobos and Ward identify a tension in describing enactive organisms as intentional systems directed at their environment. This is a critical perspective on the relation between the traditions, rather than a neutral statement of their differences. It is useful further reading on the distinction Enacting Life draws between Maturana’s biology of cognition and later accounts of sense-making.
Cummins, F., & De Jesus, P. (2016). The loneliness of the enactive cell: Towards a bio-enactive framework. Adaptive Behavior, 24(3), 149–159. https://doi.org/10.1177/1059712316644965
Examines the single cell ascending a chemical gradient, a familiar example in enactive theory and in Enacting Life. Cummins and De Jesus explain what it brings into view about identity, perspective, value, and agency, while arguing that the example leaves history and sociality underdeveloped. They turn to structural coupling and participatory sense-making to address these omissions. The paper offers a way to question what the bacterium example explains and what a fuller account of living activity requires.
Nave, K. (2026). Beyond control: Finding the purpose of enactive cognitive science. Adaptive Behavior, 34(4–5), 273–293. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123261435796
Argues that dynamical-systems descriptions alone do not establish that a system has purposes of its own. Even a pendulum can return to a stable state after disturbance. Nave locates the difference in the material conditions of living organization: in a living system, the constraints that shape activity degrade and must be regenerated by the activity they make possible. She draws on work on “closure of constraints” (Moreno & Mossio, 2015), including the proposal that what persists through development is closure as a general principle, not one fixed organization. This is the source for the robot comparison in What Makes Living Things Different?
Kirchhoff, M., Parr, T., Palacios, E., Friston, K., & Kiverstein, J. (2018). The Markov blankets of life: Autonomy, active inference and the free energy principle. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 15(138), 20170792. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2017.0792
Kirchhoff and colleagues propose a connection between biological autonomy and the free energy principle through the concept of a Markov blanket, a statistical separation between internal and external states. They describe living systems as nested organizations of such blankets, whose boundaries need not coincide with an organism’s physical boundary. This is a theoretical proposal about biological organization, not an established inference from persistence alone. Read it alongside Di Paolo et al. (2022), who dispute the proposed connection with autopoiesis and enaction.
Di Paolo, E. A., Thompson, E., & Beer, R. D. (2022). Laying down a forking path: Tensions between enaction and the free energy principle. Philosophy and the Mind Sciences, 3, Article 2. https://doi.org/10.33735/phimisci.2022.9187
Challenges claims that the free energy principle and enactivism are natural partners. Di Paolo, Thompson, and Beer distinguish autopoietic organization and operational closure from the statistical boundaries described by Markov blankets. They argue that the non-equilibrium steady-state assumptions in the formulations they examine conflict with the historical character of sense-making and development. Their criticism concerns the free energy principle as a general account of life and mind; it does not reject every empirical use of its models or rule out future reformulations.
Reynolds, J., & Baedke, J. (2026). From autopoiesis to symbiotic entanglement: Rethinking enactivism through metabolism and microbes. Adaptive Behavior, 34(4–5), 295–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251405680
A challenge from microbiome research. Many organisms, including humans, depend on resident microbes for metabolism, development, and possibly aspects of cognition. Reynolds and Baedke argue that this puts pressure on autopoietic ideas of autonomy and self-production, and on a sharp separation between organization and structure. They recommend that enactivism moderate its commitment to autopoietic theory. Read alongside Embodiment and Enactivism and What Makes Living Things Different? as a substantial challenge to their account of autonomy.
Sepúlveda-Pedro, M. A., Ramírez-Vizcaya, S., Hernández-Ochoa, J. L., Vergara-Silva, F., & Gastelum-Vargas, M. (2026). Entangled agencies: The enactive approach and Eco-Evo-Devo in the scientific study of sympoiesis as a dialectics of life. Adaptive Behavior, 34(4–5), 357–377. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123251411884
A complementary response to concerns about individualism and ecological interdependence. Drawing on ecological evolutionary developmental biology, the authors argue that individual agency does not disappear within multi-species systems such as a host and its microbes. It persists as a source of tension and change within them, and the immune system actively redraws what counts as part of the organism. They also note that enactive work has lacked a transgenerational account of how environments become significant. The developmental section of What Makes Living Things Different? describes inheritance as the reconstruction of developmental resources but leaves that question open.
Social Sense-Making, Language, and AI
De Jaegher, H., & Di Paolo, E. (2007). Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6(4), 485–507. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-007-9076-9
Extends sense-making into the social domain. De Jaegher and Di Paolo argue that coordinated interaction can take on a form of autonomy, with meaning generated and transformed through the interplay between the interaction process and the individuals involved. This offers further reading on the Coda’s discussion of conversation and human relations. Applying it to exchanges with LLMs raises an additional question: which aspects of this account depend on the participants being autonomous agents?
Dreyfus, H. L. (1992). What computers still can’t do: A critique of artificial reason. MIT Press.
Dreyfus argues that human intelligence depends on skilled bodily involvement and a background of practical understanding that explicit rules cannot capture. Drawing on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he challenges symbolic approaches to AI. The Coda uses this tradition to ask what present language models give us reason to reconsider about embodiment and linguistic performance. The book supplies philosophical background to that question; its critique of symbolic AI does not by itself settle what language models can do.
Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic bodies: The continuity between life and language. MIT Press.
A substantial enactive account of language that connects organic, sensorimotor, and social embodiment. Building on participatory sense-making, the authors explore how linguistic activity develops through embodied interaction and how it shapes human ways of living. The book offers readers of the Coda a fuller treatment of language within enactive theory, extending the inquiry beyond Maturana’s account of the consensual domain.
Barandiaran, X. E., & Almendros, L. S. (2025). Transforming agency: On the mode of existence of large language models. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-025-10094-3
Asks how LLMs should be understood in relation to agency. Using the criteria of individuality, normativity, and interactional asymmetry, the authors argue that the systems they examine lack the self-individuation and intrinsic norms of autonomous agents. They nevertheless emphasize the effects of LLMs on human activity. Their account of “midtended” agency concerns generative contributions that enter into a person’s ongoing intentional activity, such as writing, so that the sense of authorship and direction can become mixed. The Coda draws on this distinction between a system’s agency and its capacity to transform human agency.