ISPSM Double book symposium - Hohwy & Nave

Jakob Hohwy (Monash University), Kate Nave

The International Society for the Philosophy of the Sciences of the Mind announces a double book symposium on Kathryn Nave's A Drive to Survive: The Free Energy Principle and the Meaning of Life and Jakob Hohwy's The Self-Evidencing Agent: Mind, Existence and Predictive Processing.

Can the Free Energy Principle/Predictive Processing illuminate the sort of being we are? This symposium explores two important - and importantly different - ways to answer the question. Kate Nave’s book offers a negative answer, grounded in the enactivist tradition. Hohwy’s book offers a positive, internalist and representationalist answer.

By placing Nave’s and Hohwy’s opposite accounts in critical conversation, this double-book symposium explores the Free Energy Principle and the various, opposite ways in which it can be interpreted. It also sheds light on a number of foundational topics in cognitive science, including the nature of representation, the relevance of embodiment, the complex, tangly relation between our pragmatic and epistemic grip on the world, and the normativity - biological or epistemic - governing that grip.

On May 12, 2026. At 10:00 CEST

Online. For the link, please register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdVOrKG1YyHByLLk-DlfU2ABBKRjIYBBCibYJm2pGEhWyc-xQ/viewform