Francisco Varela

b 1946 in Chile – died 2001 in Paris (F). Varela studied biology at the University of Santiago de Chile, where his professor was Humberto R. Maturana. After receiving a doctorate in biology at Harvard University, he returned to Chile and worked again with Maturana at the university. Together they developed the term «autopoise,» the system theory of cognition, and published the books «Autopoiesis and Cognition» and «The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Experience» (1984). Because of the military dictatorship, Varela was forced to leave Chile in 1973. Until 1978 he was an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Medical School in Denver; in 1978/1979 he researched at the brain research laboratories of the NYU Medical School in New York; from 1980 to 1984 he was again at the University of Chile; and in 1984 he was an invited researcher at Frankfurt’s Max Planck Institute for Brain Research. In 1986 he moved to Paris, where he worked at the Institute of Neurosciences and CREA/Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie. In 1988 he was named Director of Research at the CNRS Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, where he remained until his death. Varela’s research in the area of cognitive science, and in the neurological phenomena that he specified, have had a lasting influence on different disciplines. These aspects of his work appear in many of his publications: «Cognitive Sciene – Cognitive Technology» (in collaboration with E. Thompson and E. Rosch, 1990), «The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience» (in collaboration with E. Thompson, 1992), «Why the Mind is not in the Head» (2000), and others.