Principles of Biological Autonomy

By F. Varela. 2025

1,744 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A new, updated edition of the 1979 classic from one of the foremost authors in cognitive science and theoretical biology, with the original text as well as more than 200 citations to current scientific developments. Francisco Varela’s Principles of Biological Autonomy was a groundbreaking text when it was first published in 1979, putting forth a novel theory of how living systems produce and maintain themselves. This new edition, edited and annotated by cognitive scientists Ezequiel Di Paolo and Evan Thompson—revised and complemented with introductory essays for each part of the book—contains a wealth of ideas relevant to current projects in theoretical biology, cognitive science, systems theory, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology. Over 220 margin annotations supplement the reading of the text, linking to subsequent research and broader contemporary debates. This foundational book introduces the key concept of autonomy derived as an elaboration of the idea of autopoiesis (the self-production and self-distinction) of living organisms. Varela covers topics in systems theory, neuroscience, theories of perception, and immune networks and offers a participatory epistemology that goes on to be further developed in later enactive literature. These ideas are compelling not only for historical reasons but also because they still illuminate current efforts in developing the enactive approach toward wider and more challenging goals (including language, human cognition, ethics, and environmentalism).

Subfields: Physiology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a8eec473a15cfd72fb3105472f0829689506d08e

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In Physiology

Citations in the corpus

Life after Kant: Natural purposes and the autopoietic foundations of biological individuality (2002, background): “Maturana, H. and F.Varela.”
Sensorimotor subjectivity and the enactive approach to experience (2005, background): “An autonomous system is one whose component processes meet two conditions: (i) they recursively depend on each other for their generation and their realization as a system, and (ii) they constitute the system as a unity in whatever domain they exist ( Varela 1979, p. 55 ).”
Autopoiesis, Adaptivity, Teleology, Agency (2005, background): “The theory of autopoiesis is based on mechanistic assumptions and explicitly rejects teleology (Varela 1979; Maturana and Varela 1980).”
Life and mind: From autopoiesis to neurophenomenology. A tribute to Francisco Varela (2004, background): “In Francisco’s language, this difference corresponds to the difference between an autonomous system with operational closure and a heteronomous system defined by outside control (Varela 1979).”
Some epistemological implications of devices which construct their own sensors and effectors (2000, background): “This conception of epistemic autonomy lies close to the concepts of semantic closure (Pattee 1982) organizational closure (Maturana 1981; Varela 1979), the self-modifying device (Kampis 1991; Csanyi 1989) and the anticipatory system (Rosen 1985, 1991).”
Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-temporality in Action (2009, background): “This type of organization we call autonomous (following Varela, 1979—for later developments see the contribution in Barandiaran & RuizMirazo, 2008), since it captures both the emergence of a self (autos) and that of norms (nomos).”
Tacit knowledge acquisition and sharing in a project work context (2003, background): “Learning in the cognitivist epistemology means taking knowledge from the environment and relating it to the previously acquired frames of reference, to the cognitive map [33].”
Making Sense of Sense-Making: Reflections on Enactive and Extended Mind Theories (2009, background): “Information-processing models of the mind leave unexplained the autonomous organization proper to cognitive beings because they treat cognitive systems as heteronomous systems (Thompson 2007, pp. 43–60; Varela 1979; Varela et al 1991, pp. 139–140; see also Di Paolo and Iizuka 2008).”
Enactive artificial intelligence: Investigating the systemic organization of life and mind (2009, background): “Draft paper submitted for journal publication 26 the autonomy of living systems and convert them into an operational characterization of autonomy in general, living or otherwise” (Varela 1979, p. 55): We shall say that autonomous systems are organizationally closed.”