Couverture / Jaquette

"A reissue of a classic work in philosophical biology written by Francisco Varela, with introductory material by Evan Thompson and Ezequiel Di Paolo"--

Note biographique

Francisco J. Varela (1946–2001) was Director of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique; Professor of Cognitive Science and Epistemology, CREA, at the Ecole Polytechnique; and Cofounder of the Mind and Life Institute.

Ezequiel A. Di Paolo is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Basque Foundation for Science and Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at the University of Sussex.

Evan Thompson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, where he is also Associate Member of the Department of Asian Studies and the Department of Psychology. He is a coauthor of The Embodied Mind and The Blind Spot (both MIT Press), an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and a past President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association.

Amy Cohen Varela is Chairperson of the Mind & Life Europe Board and involved with Mind and Life since its inception. She is also a clinical psychologist specialized in psychodynamic therapy and philosophy. Amy studied comparative literature at Brown and Columbia Universities before moving to Paris in the early ’80s, where she received her degree in clinical psychology at the University of Paris 7, with a specialty in psychodynamic theory and practice, and in parallel, completed psychoanalytic training.

Table des matières

Foreword
Introduction to the New Edition. A Message from the Margins
Preface. Information and Control Revisited
Part I. Autonomy of the Living and Organizational Closure
1. Autonomy and Biological Thinking
2. Autopoiesis and the Organization of Living Systems
3. A Tessellation Example of Autopoiesis
4. Embodiments of Autopoiesis
5. The Individual in Development and Evolution
6. On the Consequences of Autopoiesis
7. The Idea of Organizational Closure
Part II. Descriptions, Distinctions, and Circularities
8. Operational Explanations and the Dispensability of Information
9. Symbolic Explanations
10. The Framework of Complementarities
11. Calculating Distinctions
12. Closure and Dynamics of Form
13. Eigenbehavior
Part III. Cognitive Processes
14. The Immune Network: Self and Nonsense in the Molecular Domain
15. The Nervous System as a Closed Network
16. Epistemology Naturalized
Appendices
Appendix A Algorithm for a Tesselation Example of Autopoiesis
Appendix B Some Remarks on Reflexive Domains and Logic
Bibliography

Détails