A Short Reading Guide

These suggestions are for readers who want to go further than the readings. Each entry says briefly why it is worth reading. A longer annotated guide gives more sources, with the scholarly debates around them.

Start Here

Thompson, E. (2022). What is mind? Mind & Life Institute.

A short essay, about fifteen minutes long, on living organization, sense-making and the relational character of mind. The most accessible starting point on this list.

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

An eight-page paper and the source of the bacterium-and-sugar example. More academic than the essay above, but it shows clearly why sugar is food only in relation to the bacterium.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1987). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding (R. Paolucci, Trans.). Shambhala.

The most readable book-length introduction to Maturana and Varela’s biology of cognition, and the source of “all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing” (p. 26).

Embodiment and Enactivism

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

Explains why autopoiesis alone does not give an organism things that are better or worse for it, and what adaptivity adds.

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 account of minimal agency used in the reading, set out in full.

Enacting 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 original account of the Umwelt, tick and all. Short and still surprising.

Yong, E. (2022). An immense world: How animal senses reveal the hidden realms around us. Random House.

A popular tour of animal senses. Read it with Gomez-Marin’s review (Current Biology, 2023), which asks what a catalogue of senses leaves out.

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

Gibson, J. J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Houghton Mifflin.

The source of affordances, and a useful comparison with the enactive idea of significance.

Embodiment, Psychology, and Neuroscience

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. Worth reading for how much its own language of detectors and information differs from the conclusions Maturana later drew.

Brette, R. (2026). The brain, in theory. Princeton University Press.

A neuroscientist’s case against treating the brain as a coding or control device. Not enactivist, but close to many of the reading’s questions.

What Makes Living Things Different?

Jonas, H. (1966). The phenomenon of life: Toward a philosophical biology. Harper & Row.

The philosophical background to the idea that an organism’s being is its own doing.

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

The source of the comparison between a living cell and a robot that is switched off.

Coda

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

How meaning can arise in an interaction between people rather than in either one alone.

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

Argues that language models lack agency of their own while still changing human agency. The source of “midtended” agency.

Where the Debates Are

Ward, D. (2026). What is enactivism? Adaptive Behavior, 34(4–5), 253–271. https://doi.org/10.1177/10597123261450094

A map of enactivism that places the approach in these readings among its rivals.

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 to the idea of the organism as a self-producing unit.