Francisco Varela
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Francisco Varela in Dharamsala India, 1994
Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001), was a
Chilean
biologist,
philosopher and
neuroscientist who, together with his teacher
Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of
autopoiesis to biology.
Biography
Francisco Varela was born in 1946 in
Santiago in Chile. After completing secondary school at the Liceo Aleman de Santiago (1951-1963),like his mentor
Humberto Maturana, Varela studied first medicine then biology at the University of Chile, then did a Ph.D. in biology at
Harvard University. His thesis, defended in 1970 and supervised by
Torsten Wiesel, was titled
Insect Retinas: Information processing in the compound eye.After the 1973 military coup led by
Augusto Pinochet, Varela and his family spent 7 years in exile in the USA before returning to Chile to become a Professor of biology.Varela became a Tibetan Buddhist in the 1970s, initially studying, together with
Keun-Tshen Goba, with the meditation master
Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of
Vajradhatu and
Shambhala Training, and later with
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Nepalese meditation master of higher
tantras.In 1986, he settled in France, where he at first taught cognitive science and epistemology at the
École Polytechnique, and neuroscience at the
University of Paris. From 1988 until his death, he led a research group at the
CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique). He died in 2001 in
Paris of
Hepatitis C after having written an account of his 1998 liver transplant.
(1). Varela had four children, including the actress, environmental spokesperson, and model
Leonor Varela.
Work
Varela was primarily trained as a biologist, and was fundamentally influenced by his teacher and fellow Chilean,
Humberto Maturana, also a biologist with a strong philosophical orientation.Varela wrote and edited a number of books and numerous journal articles in
biology,
neurology,
cognitive science,
mathematics, and
philosophy. He was a founding member of the
Integral Institute, a
thinktank dedicated to the cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines. Varela was a proponent of the
embodied philosophy which argues that human
cognition and
consciousness can only be understood in terms of the enactive structures in which they arise, namely the body (understood both as a biological system and as personally, phenomenogically experienced) and the physical world with which the body interacts. He introduced into neuroscience the concepts of
neurophenomenology, based on the phenomenological writings of
Edmund Husserl and of
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and on "first person science," in which observers examine their conscious experience using scientifically verifiable methods.
See also
Publications
Varela wrote numerous books and articles:
(2)
- 1980 (with Humberto Maturana). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: Reidel.
- 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. North-Holland.
- 1998 (1987) (with Humberto Maturana). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala Press.
- 1991 (with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.
- 1992 (with P. Bourgine, eds.). Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems: The First European Conference on Artificial Life. MIT Press.
- 1992 (with J. Hayward, eds.). Gentle Bridges: Dialogues Between the Cognitive Sciences and the Buddhist Tradition. Boston: Shambhala Press.
- 1993 ( with D. Stein, eds.). Thinking About Biology: An Introduction to Theoretical Biology. Addison-Wesley, SFI Series on Complexity.
- 1997 (ed.). Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying. Boston: Wisdom Book.
- 1996-99. Invitation aux sciences cognitives. Paris: Seuil.
- 1999. Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom and Cognition. Stanford University Press.
- 1999 (with J. Shear, eds.). The View from Within: First-Person Methodologies in the Study of Consciousness. London: Imprint Academic.
- 1999 (with J. Petitot, B. Pachoud, and J-M. Roy, eds.). Naturalizing Phenomenology: Contemporary Issues in Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford University Press.
References
-
[ "Intimate Distances - Fragments for a Phenomenology of Organ Transplantation"]
-
[Comprehensive bibliography by Randall Whitaker.]
External links
{{commons|Francisco Varela}}
{{Cybernetics}}{{Systems}}
Francisco VarelaFrancisco VarelaFrancisco VarelaFrancisco VarelaFrancisco Varelaフランシスコ・バレーラFrancisco VarelaВарела, Франциско
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