Ten Years of Viewing from Within: The Legacy of Francisco Varela (Journal of Consciousness Studies)

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 ones 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.