• Why do Theory?

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    “Why do theory? You have to put so much into it and you get so little out of it.” Given the increasing drift towards empiricism and clinical studies, and the associated de-emphasising of theoretical research across the disciplines, this becomes an important question to consider (and what follows constitutes only a first attempt to provide some explanation) . Doubtless the first half of the...

    February 1, 2016
    Market Square

  • Autopoiesis

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    Autopoiesis – from the Greek ‘poiesis’ meaning reproduction – means simply self-reproduction. The concept was developed by the evolutionary biologist Humberto Maturana to describe a system capable of reproducing itself using only its own elements; elements produced by the system itself. Luhmann redefines the concept so that it is capable of describing self referential systems. In the following short passage he states that autopoietic systems...

    January 27, 2016
    Concept Alley

  • Richard Flanagan on the Autology of Literature

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    Novelist Richard Flanagan says English-language culture tends to see literature as a moral guide. If that were true, literature would issue from an external vantage point – a God-like perch from which it observes and describes us and offers us guidance on how to live: “But literature cannot do that, it doesn’t do that. It is of life, and part of life. And therefore it cannot escape life,...

    January 21, 2016
    Occasional Cafe

  • Humberto Maturana

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    Humberto Maturana was born in Santiago, Chile in September 1928. He began studying medicine in 1950 and received a PhD in biology from Harvard in 1958. In 1954 he studied anatomy and neurophysiology at University College London. He joined Heinz von Foerster at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois as a visiting professor from 1969-70. Known variously as a biologist, cybernetician...

    January 5, 2016
    Rogues Corner