The concept of autopoiesis has long surpassed the realm of biology. It has been used in areas so diverse as sociology, psychotherapy, management, anthropology, organizational culture, and many others. This circumstance transformed it in a very important and useful instrument for the investigation of reality.

| Oikos

Je možné být skutečně objektivní? Je to možné alespoň v sociální, politické, ekonomické analýze? Jestliže ne, znamená to, že zůstáváme na pospas nejkrajnějšímu relativismu? Je toto hlavní příčina našich obtíží při zlepšování světa?

Lesson 3 consists of two texts: an introduction to autopoietic theory by Randal Whitaker and a major text by Humberto Maturana. There are links to the important Website of Randal Whitaker on Autopoiesis, where a bibliography and suggestions for further reading may be found. At the end of this page ...

This introductory tutorial is designed to give you a brief overview of autopoietic theory -- the term I use to denote the work of Chilean biologists Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. The following sections each provide a summary overview of a key concept.

This talk, delivered at “De l’autopoie`se a` la neurophe ́nome ́nologie: un hommage a` Francisco Varela; from autopoiesis to neurophenomenology: a tribute to Francisco Varela,” June 18–20, at the Sorbonne in Paris, explicates several links between Varela’s neurophenomenology and his biological concept of autopoiesis.

Niklas Luhmann is considered to be a major proponent of the constructivist movement who based his highly complex sociological theory on constructivist concepts such as Maturana’s autopoiesis and Spencer Brown’s distinction.

This tutorial will treat the ontological basis of Autopoietic Theory and its extension into the realm of social theory. It will implicitly treat epistemology as well, and will concentrate on the construction of a non-dual basis of theorizing about the phenomena of life, intelligence, social and psychological phenomena. These ontological ...

My intent in this essay is to reflect on the history of some biological notions such as autopoiesis, structural coupling, and cognition, that I have developed since the early 1960's as a result of my work on visual perception and the organization of the living. No doubt I shall repeat ...

The term 'autopoiesis' has been invented to define life its origin is clearly biological. Its extension to other fields has been discussed, but rather unsuccessfully and on the wrong premises. The problem may well be that we use a questionable approach to the issue, 'tangling' our 'hierarchies' of investigation.

The concept of self-organization that has come into use as the generic term for a category of related, yet nonidentical concepts that are being applied within the context of various fields of research: autopoiesis, synergetics, dissipative structures, self-referential systems, and deterministic chaos. The purpose of this introduction is a) to ...