Humberto Maturana

Humberto Maturana is a biologist and philosopher who was born in Santiago, Chile. He gained his PhD at Harvard in 1958. From 1965 to 2003 he was Professor of Biology at the University of Chile and from1968-69 he was visiting professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In 2001 he founded the Instituto Matriztico, through which he currently offers educational programs grounded in the body of his work, which he collectively terms the Biology of Cognition and the Biology of Love.  Maturana is the originator of the concept of autopoiesis, which he has co-published with his former student Francisco Varela in Autopoiesis and cognition: the organisation of the living (1980). Maturana and Varela also co-authored a general text The tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding (1987) based on a biology course Maturana had been teaching.

Although Humberto Maturana does not consider himself to be a constructivist, he is said to be one of the founders of radical constructivism, an epistemology based on empirical findings of neurobiology. As a leading contributor to second-order cybernetics, he has influenced fields as diverse as family therapy, medicine, education, business and ecology. Some of his seminal contributions have been popularised in recent books by the physicist and systems theorist, Fritjof Capra.

Maturana has published extensively in Spanish, for example El Sentido de lo Humano, (1991), La Objetividad (1997), and Formacion Humana y Capacitacion, among others. His work has also been published in German and French: Biologie der Realität (1998), Was ist erkennen? (2001) and Vom Sein zum Tun (2002) Liebe und Spiel: die vergessenen Grundlagen des Menschseins (with Gerda Verden-Zöller, 1997) and De L’Origine des Especes, (with Jorge Mpodozis, 1998.)

This workshop offers a unique opportunity to engage with the ideas of one of the world’s most original thinkers. The UKSS Conference on 7 and 8 September will be the occasion of the presentation of the UKSS Gold Medal to Humberto Maturana.

More information about Maturana can be found on http://open2.net/systems/resources/hum.html

From Biological foundations of morals and ethics in education:

“We human beings are not genetically determined. …We become in our living according to the way we live as our structure changes in the flow of our living according to the course of this flow …

Our genetic constitution determines in us only our initial structure, the fundament of our possible becoming, but what we become arises epigenetically in the dynamic domain in which we exist, both as living systems and as human beings”.