Francisco Varela
Encyclopedia
Chile
Chile ,officially the Republic of Chile , is a country in South America occupying a long, narrow coastal strip between the Andes mountains to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west. It borders Peru to the north, Bolivia to the northeast, Argentina to the east, and the Drake Passage in the far...
an biologist
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
and neuroscientist
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
who, together with his teacher Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist and philosopher. He is considered a member of the second wave of cybernetics, known for developing a theory of autopoiesis about the nature of reflexive feedback control in living systems.- Biography :After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de...
, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to biology.
Biography
Francisco Varela was born in 1946 in SantiagoSantiago, Chile
Santiago , also known as Santiago de Chile, is the capital and largest city of Chile, and the center of its largest conurbation . It is located in the country's central valley, at an elevation of above mean sea level...
in Chile. After completing secondary school at the Liceo Aleman de Santiago (1951–1963),like his mentor Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist and philosopher. He is considered a member of the second wave of cybernetics, known for developing a theory of autopoiesis about the nature of reflexive feedback control in living systems.- Biography :After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de...
, Varela studied first medicine then biology at the University of Chile, then did a Ph.D. in biology at Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. His thesis, defended in 1970 and supervised by Torsten Wiesel
Torsten Wiesel
Torsten Nils Wiesel was a Swedish co-recipient with David H. Hubel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W...
, was titled Insect Retinas: Information processing in the compound eye.
After the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet
Augusto Pinochet
Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte, more commonly known as Augusto Pinochet , was a Chilean army general and dictator who assumed power in a coup d'état on 11 September 1973...
, 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
Vajradhatu
Vajradhatu was the name of the umbrella organization of Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, one of the first Tibetan Buddhist lamas to visit and teach in the West. It served as the vehicle for the promulgation of his Buddhist teachings, and was also the name by which his community was known from 1973 until...
and Shambhala Training
Shambhala Training
Shambhala Training is a secular approach to meditation developed by the late Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa and his students. It is based on what Trungpa calls Shambhala Vision, which sees enlightened society as not purely mythical, but as realizable by people of all faiths through...
, and later with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche
Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche . A contemporary Buddhist master of the Kagyü and Nyingma lineages, who lived at Nagi Gompa hermitage in Nepal, Urgyen Rinpoche was considered one of the greatest Dzogchen masters of our time.-Life:...
, a Nepalese meditation master of higher tantra
Tantra
Tantra , anglicised tantricism or tantrism or tantram, is the name scholars give to an inter-religious spiritual movement that arose in medieval India, expressed in scriptures ....
s.
In 1986, he settled in France, where he at first taught cognitive science and epistemology at the École Polytechnique
École Polytechnique
The École Polytechnique is a state-run institution of higher education and research in Palaiseau, Essonne, France, near Paris. Polytechnique is renowned for its four year undergraduate/graduate Master's program...
, and neuroscience at the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
. From 1988 until his death, he led a research group at the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique).
He died in 2001 in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
of Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C
Hepatitis C is an infectious disease primarily affecting the liver, caused by the hepatitis C virus . The infection is often asymptomatic, but chronic infection can lead to scarring of the liver and ultimately to cirrhosis, which is generally apparent after many years...
after having written an account of his 1998 liver transplant. Varela had four children, including the actress, environmental spokesperson, and model Leonor Varela
Leonor Varela
Leonor Varela Palma is a Chilean actress, and model. She played the character Cleopatra in the 1999 film Cleopatra...
.
Work
Varela was primarily trained as a biologist, and was fundamentally influenced by his teacher and fellow Chilean, Humberto MaturanaHumberto Maturana
Humberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist and philosopher. He is considered a member of the second wave of cybernetics, known for developing a theory of autopoiesis about the nature of reflexive feedback control in living systems.- Biography :After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de...
, also a biologist with a strong philosophical orientation.
Varela wrote and edited a number of books and numerous journal articles in biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
, neurology
Neurology
Neurology is a medical specialty dealing with disorders of the nervous system. Specifically, it deals with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of disease involving the central, peripheral, and autonomic nervous systems, including their coverings, blood vessels, and all effector tissue,...
, cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
, mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, and philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. He was a founding member of the Integral Institute
Integral Institute
The Integral Institute is a think-tank founded in 1998 by American author Ken Wilber. The purpose of the Institute is to gather and attempt to integrate the various viewpoints found in a number of major fields of knowledge...
, a thinktank dedicated to the cross-fertilization of ideas and disciplines.
Varela was a proponent of the embodied philosophy which argues that human cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
and consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
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, phenomenologically experienced) and the physical world with which the body interacts. He introduced into neuroscience the concepts of neurophenomenology
Neurophenomenology
Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind...
, based on the phenomenological writings of Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
, and on "first person science," in which observers examine their own conscious experience using scientifically verifiable methods.
See also
- Autopoiesis
- Cartesian anxietyCartesian anxietyCartesian anxiety refers to the notion that, ever since René Descartes promulgated his highly influential form of body-mind dualism, Western civilization has suffered from a longing for ontological certainty, or feeling that scientific methods, and especially the study of the world as a thing...
- Molecular Cellular CognitionMolecular cellular cognitionMolecular cellular cognition is that branch of neuroscience that involves the study of cognitive processes with approaches that integrate molecular, cellular and behavioral mechanisms...
- Phenomenology
- NeurophenomenologyNeurophenomenologyNeurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis on the embodied condition of the human mind...
- Neurodynamics
Publications
Varela wrote numerous books and articles:- 1980 (with Humberto MaturanaHumberto MaturanaHumberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist and philosopher. He is considered a member of the second wave of cybernetics, known for developing a theory of autopoiesis about the nature of reflexive feedback control in living systems.- Biography :After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de...
). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Boston: Reidel. - 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. North-Holland.
- 1998 (1987) (with Humberto MaturanaHumberto MaturanaHumberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist and philosopher. He is considered a member of the second wave of cybernetics, known for developing a theory of autopoiesis about the nature of reflexive feedback control in living systems.- Biography :After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de...
). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala Press. - 1991 (with Evan ThompsonEvan ThompsonEvan Thompson is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto. He writes about cognitive science, phenomenology, and the philosophy of mind....
and Eleanor RoschEleanor RoschEleanor Rosch is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in cognitive psychology and primarily known for her work on categorization, in particular her prototype theory, which has profoundly influenced the field of cognitive psychology...
). 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.
External links
- Intimate Distances An autobiographical essay written shortly before his death
- Francisco Varela: In memoriam:
- The Embodied Mind:
- Evan Thompson, coauthor.
- Eleanor Rosch, coauthor.
- Daniel DennettDaniel DennettDaniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
, 1993, "Review of The Embodied Mind," American Journal of Psychology 106: 121-26.
- "Escher, enaction & intersubjectivity."
- "Why the mind is not in the head" The Cosmos Letter, Expo'90 Foundation, Japan
- Franz Reichle, 2004. Film Monte Grande - What is Life?