1
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
2
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
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
Mind emerges from matter and life at an empirical level, but at a transcendental level every form or structure is necessarily also a form or structure disclosed by consciousness. With this reversal one passes from the natural attitude of the scientist to the transcendental phenomenological attitude (which, according to phenomenology, is the properly philosophical attitude).Evan Thompson
5
We human beings constitute and reconstitute ourselves through cultural traditions, which we experience as our own development in a historical time that spans the generations. To investigate the life-world as horizon and ground of all experience therefore requires investigating none other than generativity - the processes of becoming, of making and remaking, that occur over the generations and within which any individual genesis is always already situated.. Individual subjectivity is intersubjectively and culturally embodied, embedded, and emergent.Evan Thompson
6
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