Humberto Maturana Quotes

Humberto Maturana is a Chilean biologist turned philosopher. Many consider him a member of a group of second-order cybernetics theoreticians such as Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Maturana, along with Francisco Varela and Ricardo B. Uribe, is particularly known for creating the term "autopoiesis" about the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems, and concepts such as structural determinism and structure coupling. His work has been influential in many fields, mainly the field of systems thinking and cybernetics. Overall, his work is concerned with the biology of cognition. Wikipedia  

✵ 14. September 1928
Humberto Maturana: 14   quotes 7   likes

Famous Humberto Maturana Quotes

“Love is the grounding of our existence as humans, and is the basic emotioning in our systemic identity as human beings.”

Humberto Maturana et al. (1996) " Biology of love http://www.lifesnaturalsolutions.com.au/documents/biology-of-love.pdf"

“We can also say that language is a domain of recursive linguistic co-ordinations of actions, or a domain of second-order linguistic co-ordinations of actions. We human beings also co-ordinate our actions with each other in first-order linguistic domains, and we do so frequently with non-human animals.”

Source: Reality; The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument (1988), p. 48 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989) " Life, the Multiverse and Everything; an Introduction to the Ideas of. Humberto Maturana http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm".

“Anything said is said by an observer.”

Attributed to Maturana in: Heinz von Foerster (1979) " Cybernetics of Cybernetics http://faculty.stevenson.edu/jlombardi/pdf's/cybernetics.pdf"
Von Foerster "baptized"this quote as "Humberto Maturana’s Theorem Number One".

Humberto Maturana Quotes

“By autopoietic organization, Maturana and Varela meant the] processes interlaced in the specific form of a network of productions of components which realizing the network that produced them constitutes it as a unity.”

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 80 as cited in: Lee O. Thayer, George A. Barnett (1997) * Organization-Communication: Emerging Perspectives, Volume 5:. p. 193.

Similar authors

Salvador Allende photo
Salvador Allende 16
Chilean physician and politician
Pablo Neruda photo
Pablo Neruda 136
Chilean poet
Isabel Allende photo
Isabel Allende 60
Chilean writer
Gabriela Mistral photo
Gabriela Mistral 2
Chilean poet-diplomat, writer, educator and feminist.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin 64
French philosopher and Jesuit priest
Augusto Pinochet photo
Augusto Pinochet 28
Former dictator of the republic of Chile
Martin Heidegger photo
Martin Heidegger 69
German philosopher
Richard Dawkins photo
Richard Dawkins 322
English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author
Paulo Freire photo
Paulo Freire 115
educator and philosopher
Emil M. Cioran photo
Emil M. Cioran 531
Romanian philosopher and essayist