Inspirations
For a list of all the many references relative to paradox, please see the bibliography and sources in the book Embracing Paradox: How to Keep Going When You Can’t.
Some of the work that inspires me:
In nature nothing exists alone. —Rachel Carson
To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds. — bell hooks
It takes two to know one. —Gregory Bateson
All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing. —Maturana & Varela
Way-making is a term inspired by Taoism, and can be understood as the movement of the body as well as the movement of the mind: “Way-making blunts the sharp edges and untangles the knots; it softens the glare and brings things together on the same track.” (Ames and Hall, 2003 in Bouton, 2024).
In addition to the Daoist tradition and the wide literature relative to studies in ‘complexity’, some other references for the history from which my own ideas have developed are the following:
In addition to every hippocampus researcher and espcially the McGill university tradition of neuroscience, as well as to all those I’ve had discussions with here, over my life, I’ve been influenced by Rachel Carson, Herbert Mead, W.E.B. Du Bois, William James, Lynn Margulis, Hilary Putnam, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Hannah Arendt, Rodney Brooks, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ingeborg Bachmann, Edmund Husserl, Kurt Godel, Edward Tolman, Donna Haraway (‘making-with’), Richard Rorty, G.W.F. Hegel, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Ryle, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Francisco Varela, Edward Tolman, Evan Thompson, Elias Cannetti, J.J. Gibson, William Blake, William Butler Yeats, Eleanor McGuire, Karl Friston, Andy Clark, Gregory Bateson and Thích Nhất Hạnh.
Some more specific books and papers:
Phenomenology of Perception by M. Merleau-Ponty
The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map by O’Keefe and Nadal
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram
Unthought by N. Katherine Hayles
Phenomenology of Spirt by G.W.F. Hegel
The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems by J.J. Gibson
Perspectival Realism by Michela Massimi
Making by Tim Ingold
Ecology of the Brain by Thomas Fuchs
Woman and Nature by Susan Griffin
The Tangled Tree by David Quammen
The Life of Lines by Tim Ingold
The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas
Action in Perception and Strange Tools by Alva Noë
Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men by Edward Tolman
Mind in Life by Evan Thompson
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Ideas by Edmund Husserl
The Concept of Mind by Gilbert Ryle.
There is more than one kind of learning by Edward Tolman
Le visible et l’invisible by Maurice Merleau-Ponty
The Embodied Mind Cognitive Science and Human Experience by Francisco J. Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson
The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology by Husserl
Gentle Bridges by Hayward & Varela
The Big Sea by Langston Hughes
On Love by bel hooks
Participatory sense-making: An enactive approach to social cognition by Hanne De Jaegher & Ezequiel Di Paolo (and basically all the papers and work by Di Paolo and De Jaegher)
Radical Embodied Cognitive Science by Anthony P. Chemero
The Old Ways by Robert McFarlane
The Music of Life by Denis Noble
The Embodied Mind by Rosch, Thompson, Varela
Voice of the Poet by Wallace Stevens
The Grey Album by Kevin Young
Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt
Familiar Stranger by Stuart Hall
I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
From Bacteria to Bach and Back by Daniel Dennett
Reality is Not What it Seems by Carlo Rovelli
Kurze Einführung in die Neue Phänomenologie by Hermann Schmitz
On Trails by Robert Moor
Enaction by Stewart, Gapenne, and Di Paolo (Eds.)
Ethics by Benedict Spinoza
Conceptual Spaces by Peter Gärdenfors
The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin
Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm
Ecological Identity by Mitchell Thomashow
Loving and Knowing by Hanne De Jaegher
These videos by Fred Cummins are also important.
The work of Richard Watson
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andrea hiott & waymaking
Andrea Hiott is a philosopher, cognitive scientist, and author who has developed a philosophy of mind known as Waymaking, which reframes cognition as a dynamic process of movement through various spatiotemporal landscapes. This framework defines cognition not as a separate mental function but as the trajectories of an agent’s movement through its ongoing encounter with the world, encompassing mental, physical, and virtual realms. Waymaking emphasizes that cognition is not confined to human experience but is a process shared across species, rooted in the embodied, navigational abilities of living beings.
The concept is inspired by recent research on the hippocampal formation and entorhinal cortex, which show that knowledge acquisition, memory, and spatial navigation are part of a continuous, nonlinear process governed by statistical regularities in sensory landscapes. Hiott's work positions cognition as a form of navigation—what she calls "way-making"—where movement and knowing are intertwined: "Movement is a way of knowing and knowing is a way of moving". This approach avoids collapsing the distinctions between mental and physical, instead holding them as complementary aspects of a shared process.
Waymaking is not merely about finding paths but about actively making them, acknowledging the uniqueness of each embodied being’s trajectory through time and space. It is a practice that resists binary thinking, promoting the idea of "holding the paradox" and moving beyond dichotomies such as mind-body or human-animal. Hiott uses this framework to explore how intelligence manifests in diverse forms, from human cognition to plant and animal behaviors, arguing that what humans label as cognition is merely the "growing tip" of a much older, life-wide process of navigability.
She has applied this philosophy across disciplines, including urban planning, neuroscience, and technology, and is currently a doctoral researcher in the Philosophy and Phenomenology at Heidelberg Universität, focusing on ecological orientation. Hiott is also the host of the podcast Love and Philosophy, where she explores themes of cognition, embodiment, and connection with leading thinkers. Her work is further disseminated through her Substack publication Waymaking, where she writes on topics such as threshold visioning and embracing paradox. She has authored books including Thinking Small, which explores the philosophy of transportation and mobility.