Humberto Maturana

Humberto Maturana Romesín ( born September 14, 1928 in Santiago de Chile) is a Chilean biologist and philosopher specializing in neurobiology.

• 5.1 Primary Sources
• 5.2 secondary literature 5.2.1 Secondary Literature - General
• 5.2.2 Reviews to Maturana works

Life

Maturana studied medicine from 1948 at the Universidad de Chile and in 1954 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation Biology / Anatomy at University College, London. There, for the first time created a theory about the existence of living systems as autonomous dynamic units.

In 1956 he completed his doctoral studies at Harvard University, USA, where he completed a doctorate in biology in 1958. He worked until 1960 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge (Massachusetts ), USA, in a postdoctoral position in research on the eye ( blind spot ) to epistemological questions.

In 1960 he was offered the chair of biology at the Faculty of Medicine of the Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile. There, he specialized in studies on visual perception, particularly the perception of color, and on the basis of distinguishing living systems and non- living systems.

From 1970 to 1973 he worked in close collaboration with Francisco J. Varela in Santiago de Chile. From 1970 he devoted himself to the development of the " biology of cognition " and engaged in a neurophysiologist with epistemological questions about the way the " biology of cognition ".

Maturana lives in his native city of Santiago de Chile, where he heads along with Prof. Dávila Instituto Matriztico.

Importance

Together with Francisco J. Varela led Maturana a the term autopoiesis and is considered one of the founders of radical constructivism, although, for example, in an interview from 2002, the term constructivist rejects for itself.

Biology and epistemology: The mind as a process

Early Maturana had studied the teachings of the biologist Jakob Johann von Uexküll and, influenced, directed his attention to the organism and its environment. It led him to the question: What is " cognitive " as a biological phenomenon?

It originated broader issues in the 1960s:

• What is life?
• What qualities must have a system so that you can refer to it as truly alive?
• Can we make a clear distinction between living and non- living systems?

With his knowledge, that the answer of understanding of the " organization of the living " is, he was able to combine two traditions of systems thinking:

• Cybernetics, which deals with targeted processes of regulation and control in systems.

Maturana sat in a row with the cognitive process of life the same. He published his ideas in 1970 and began working with Francisco Varela, a younger neuroscientists. Together they developed the concept of autopoiesis and published two years later its first description.

The concept of autopoiesis is an integral part of the biological theory of cognition, Maturana and Varela, who in The Tree of Knowledge (Orig. El Arbol del Conocimiento, 1984) formulated comprehensively. This says goodbye to a conception of the world as a collection of recognizable observer independent objects and weaves together the processes of autopoiesis and the products manufactured by the nervous system sensorimotor relationships (correlations ) of the moving organism to a constant act of bringing forth a world in the ongoing process of life enforcement. Objects appear therefore as a continuously generated constants or regularities of the states of the nervous system of a human organism in its particular linguistic (social) actions with respect to its surroundings ( " operational closure of the nervous system ").

According to Maturana and Varela, the concept of autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organization of living systems. Along with Varela developed a system Maturana 's theory of cognition ( also called Santiago theory ). It is the cognition, cognitive process, identified with the process of life. Communication is therefore no transmission of information, but a behavior coordination between living organisms through reciprocal structural coupling. According to Maturana we can understand the human consciousness only by the language and the whole social context in which it is embedded.

Maturana Instituto Matriztico

Maturana's thinking and way of working is not only reflected in the interdisciplinary thinking between biology, philosophy, psychology and sociology. Likewise, his life's work includes the creation of the Instituto Matriztico in Santiago de Chile, with Ximena Dávila Yañez. There Maturana practiced with Davila and staff of the Institute interdisciplinary work, including philosophical, psychological and sociological issues and to better understand the biological basis of humanity.

Quotes

"We create the world in which we live, literally by the fact that we live it. "

" As living systems we exist in complete solitude within the limits of our individual autopoiesis. Only the fact that we create with others by consensual areas worlds, we create an existence that exceeds this our fundamental solitude, without, however, can pick up. [ ... ] We can not see us if we do not get to see in our interactions with others and the fact that we see others as reflections of ourselves, see ourselves as well as the reflection of the other. "

Awards

In December 2009, Maturana received an honorary doctorate from the Universidad de Santiago de Chile ( USACH ).

Works

Primary literature

• With Gerda Verden Zoeller, Carl -Auer -Verlag (Ed.): love and game: The Forgotten Fundamentals of being human. Heidelberg 1993, ISBN 3-927-80918-7.
• Together with Francisco Varela: Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding. (Translation of: El árbol del conocimiento.1984, 1987. ) Frankfurt 2010 ISBN 978-3-596-17855-1. .
• Recognition: The organization and embodiment of reality, Brunswick 1982; ISBN 3-528-18465-5.
• On the biology of cognition: An interview with Humberto R. Maturana and contributions to the discussion of his work ( with Volker Riegas and Christian Vetter ), 1990.
• For the lip, Rudolph ( ed.): What is seen? . Durchges. Taschenbuchausg. Edition. Piper, Munich, Zurich 1996, ISBN 3-492-22289-7.
• "I am not a constructivist ," Interview with Astrid Kaiser in Päd Forum 2003.
• " Observers. Convergence of theories of knowledge? " ( Niklas Luhmann, Humberto R. Maturana, and Mikio Namiki ), 2003.

Secondary Literature - General

• Interview with H. Maturana in: Pörksen, Bernhard. " The certainty of uncertainty - Conversations with constructivism ". Carl Auer -Verlag, Heidelberg, 2008 ( 2nd edition). P.70 - 111.

• Comments and / or commenting on reviews, created at the University of Vienna