Evan Thompson Quotes

#1. The organism's environment is the sense it makes of the world. This environment is a place of significance and valence, as a result of the global action of the organism.

Evan Thompson

#2. To exist as an individual means not simply to be numerically distinct from other things but to be a self-pole in a dynamic relationship with alterity, with what is other, with the world.

Evan Thompson

#3. Something acquires meaning for an organism to the extent that it relates (either positively or negatively) to the norm of the maintenance of the organism's integrity.

Evan Thompson

#4. The central idea of this book is that the self is a process, not a thing or an entity. The self isn't something outside experience, hidden either in the brain or in some immaterial realm.

Evan Thompson

#5. Only by intertwining these two perspectives, the biological and the phenomenological, can we gain a fuller understanding of the immanent purposiveness of the organism and the deep continuity of life and mind.

Evan Thompson

#6. The waking world isn't outside and separate from our mind. It's brought forth and enacted through our imaginative perception of it.

Evan Thompson

#7. the grasping mind cannot grasp its ultimate inability to grasp; it can only cultivate its tolerance of that inability.

Evan Thompson