Ten Years of Viewing from Within: The Legacy of Francisco Varela

The View from Within, edited by the late Francisco Varela in collaboration with Jonathan Shear, was published in 1999 and has proved a major stimulus to the scientific investigation of first-person methodologies in psychology and philosophy of mind. Ten years on, Claire Petitmengin has organized a collection of essays that examine and refine the research program on first-person methods defined in The View from Within, with contributions based on empirical research. She has kept close to the spirit of the earlier book, in which Varela encouraged a precise description of the very process of becoming aware of one’s experience and describing it, by gathering the contributions of researchers who not only propose first-person descriptions, but who also try to describe the process of description itself, in order to make the description reproducible -- a necessary condition for any scientific undertaking.