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Francisco Varela

Francisco Varela was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis in biology. He received degrees from universities in Chile and a PhD from Harvard. After exile from Chile due to the Pinochet coup, he taught in France and helped found the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialogue between science and Buddhism. Varela supported embodied philosophy and neurophenomenology, examining consciousness through biological structures and combining neuroscience with first-person experience. He authored several influential books and popularized the work of Maturana, Prigogine, and Bateson on living systems and complexity.

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355 views5 pages

Francisco Varela

Francisco Varela was a Chilean biologist, philosopher, and neuroscientist known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis in biology. He received degrees from universities in Chile and a PhD from Harvard. After exile from Chile due to the Pinochet coup, he taught in France and helped found the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialogue between science and Buddhism. Varela supported embodied philosophy and neurophenomenology, examining consciousness through biological structures and combining neuroscience with first-person experience. He authored several influential books and popularized the work of Maturana, Prigogine, and Bateson on living systems and complexity.

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Francisco Varela

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Francisco J. Varela)
For other people named Francisco Varela, see Francisco Varela (disambiguation).
In this Spanish name, the first or paternal surname is Varela and the second or
maternal family name is García.

Francisco Varela

Varela in 1994

Born September 7, 1946


Talcahuano, Chile

Died 28 May 2001 (aged 54)

Paris, France

Alma mater Pontifical Catholic University of Chile; University of

Chile; Harvard University

Known for Theory of autopoiesis

Children Leonor Varela

Scientific career

Institutions École Polytechnique; CNRS; University of

Paris; Mind and Life Institute

Thesis Insect retinas; visual processing in the compound

eye (1970)

Doctoral Torsten Wiesel

advisor

Influences Humberto Maturana, 14th Dalai Lama

Francisco Javier Varela García (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001) was


a Chilean biologist, philosopher, cybernetician, and neuroscientist who, together with his
mentor Humberto Maturana, is best known for introducing the concept of autopoiesis to
biology, and for co-founding the Mind and Life Institute to promote dialog between
science and Buddhism.

Life and career[edit]


Varela was born in 1946 in Talcahuano in Chile, the son of Corina María Elena García
Tapia and Raúl Andrés Varela Rodríguez. [1][2] After completing secondary school at the
Liceo Alemán del Verbo Divino in Santiago (1951–1963), like his mentor Humberto
Maturana, Varela temporarily studied medicine at the Pontifical Catholic University of
Chile and graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Chile. He later
obtained 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 United States before he returned to Chile to become a professor of
biology at the Universidad de Chile.
Varela became familiar, by practice, with Tibetan Buddhism in the 1970s, initially
studying, together with Keun-Tshen Goba (né Ezequiel Hernandez Urdaneta), with the
meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Vajradhatu and Shambhala
Training, and later with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche, a Tibetan meditation master of
higher tantras.
In 1986, he settled in France, where he first taught cognitive science and epistemology
at the École Polytechnique, and later neuroscience at the University of Paris. From
1988 until his death, he led a research group, as Director of Research at
the CNRS (Centre National de Recherche Scientifique).
In 1987, Varela, along with R. Adam Engle, founded the Mind and Life Institute, initially
to sponsor a series of dialogues between scientists and the Dalai Lama about the
relationship between modern science and Buddhism.[3] The Institute continues today as
a major nexus for such dialog as well as promoting and supporting multidisciplinary
scientific investigation in mind sciences, contemplative scholarship and practice and
related areas in the interface of science with meditation and other contemplative
practices, especially Buddhist practices.[4]
Varela died in 2001 in Paris of Hepatitis C after having written an account of his 1998
liver transplant.[5] Varela had four children, including the actress, environmental
spokesperson, and model Leonor Varela.

Work and legacy[edit]


Varela was trained as a biologist, mathematician and philosopher through the influence
of different teachers, Humberto Maturana and Torsten Wiesel.
He wrote and edited a number of books and numerous journal articles
in biology, neurology, cognitive science, mathematics, and philosophy. He founded, with
others, the Integral Institute, a thinktank dedicated to the cross-fertilization of ideas and
disciplines.
Varela supported embodied philosophy, viewing human cognition and consciousness in
terms of the enactive structures in which they arise. These comprise the body (as a
biological system and as personally experienced) and the physical world which it
enacts.[6]
Varela's work popularized within the field of neuroscience the concept
of neurophenomenology. This concept combined the phenomenology of Edmund
Husserl and of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, with "first-person science."
Neurophenomenology requires observers to examine their own conscious experience
using scientifically verifiable methods.
In the 1996 popular book The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living
Systems, physicist Fritjof Capra makes extensive reference to Varela and Maturana's
theory of autopoiesis as part of a new, systems-based scientific approach for describing
the interrelationships and interdependence of psychological, biological, physical, social,
and cultural phenomena.[7] Written for a general audience, The Web of Life helped
popularize the work of Varela and Maturana, as well as that of Ilya
Prigogine and Gregory Bateson.[8]
Varela's 1991 book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, co-
authored with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch, is considered a classic in the field of
cognitive science, offering pioneering phenomenological connections and introducing
the Buddhism-informed enactivist and embodied cognition approach.[9] A revised edition
of The Embodied Mind was published in 2017, featuring substantive introductions by the
surviving authors, as well as a preface by Jon Kabat-Zinn.[10]

Publications[edit]
Varela wrote numerous books and articles:[11]
Books[edit]
 1979. Principles of Biological Autonomy. North-Holland.
 1980 (with Humberto Maturana). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the
Living. Boston: Reidel.
 1987 (rev 1992, 1998) (with Maturana). The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological
Roots of Human Understanding. Boston: Shambhala Press. ISBN 978-0877736424
 1988. Connaître:Les Sciences Cognitives, tendences et perspectivess. Éditions du
Seuil, Paris.
 1991 (rev 2017) (with Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch). The Embodied Mind:
Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-72021-2
 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. [Reprinted, 2014,
as Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind.]
 1993 (with W. Stein, eds.). Thinking About Biology: An Introduction to Theoretical
Biology. Addison-Wesley, SFI Series on Complexity. [Reprinted, 2018, as Thinking
About Biology: An Invitation to Current Theoretical Biology, CRC Press.]
 1997 (ed.). Sleeping, Dreaming and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with
the Dalai Lama. Boston: Wisdom Books.
 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.
Notable articles[edit]
 2002 (with A. Weber). 'Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic
foundations of biological individuality'. Phenomenology and the Cognitive
Sciences I:97–125, 2002.

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