Abstract
What is the nature of life? How do our cognitive processes relate to our perception of the world? These are big questions of both biology and philosophy, and answering them is the life-work of Humberto Romesín Maturana. His work has been massively influential in systems thinking, and has been applied to many other fields. It is deeply philosophical in its implications, but has a strong biological grounding. Although Maturana’s name is most closely associated with the theory of autopoiesis (self-producing systems), work that he carried out with his student and close collaborator Francisco Varela, his work is more general than the ideas of autopoiesis. It can best be summed up in the title of an early paper (reprinted in Maturana HR, Varela FJ. Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. Reidel, Dordrecht, 1980) – the biology of cognition.
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Ramage, M., Shipp, K. (2020). Humberto Maturana. In: Systems Thinkers. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7475-2_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4471-7475-2_20
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