Concept
Autopoiesis
Overview
The term autopoiesis (from Greek αὐτo- (auto) 'self' and ποίησις (poiesis) 'creation, production'), one of several current theories of life, refers to a system capable of producing and maintaining itself by creating its own parts.
Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, introduced the term to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells.
The concept has since been applied to the fields of cognition, neurobiology, systems theory, architecture and sociology. Niklas Luhmann briefly introduced the concept of autopoiesis to organizational theory.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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In the third place, we shall limit ourselves to the particular consideration of the principle itself. Each principle has reigned for a certain time, and when the whole system of the world has been explained from this special form, it is called a philosophical system. Its whole theory has certainly to be learned, but as long as the principle is abstract it is not sufficient to embrace the forms belonging to our…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy
States what Autopoiesis is; the author is tied to Autopoiesis in the knowledge graph.
Through this unity of Life's energy in both its branches all the members of the organism are up held in their integrity, and continually flushed anew with the ideality of their life. This ideality is furthermore declared by the organic parts in the fundamental law of their being, that this unity of Life is not so much an accidental quality as, on the contrary, the substance of it. In this alone they are able to…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 1
The author is tied to Autopoiesis in the knowledge graph.
As regards this theory of Epigenesis, no one has contributed more either to its proof or to the establishment of the legitimate principles of its application,--partly by the limitation of a too presumptuous employment of it,--than Herr Hofr. _Blumenbach_.[122] In all physical explanations of these formations he starts from organised matter. That crude matter should have originally formed itself according to…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Autopoiesis is.
Philosophers who discussed Autopoiesis
Related ideas
- Cognition
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Slavoj Žižek
- Sociology
- Abiogenesis
- Neuroscience
- Architecture
- Qualia
- Niklas Luhmann
- Nucleic acid
- Donna Haraway
- Knowledge
- Explanatory gap
- Self-organization
- Systems theory
- Constructivism (philosophy of science)
- Chemistry
- Consciousness
- Direct and indirect realism
- Stuart Kauffman
- Hard problem of consciousness
- Enactivism
- Francisco Varela
- Solipsism
Place in the tradition
Part of Embodied cognition.