| Course title | Francisco Varela's Biophilosophy |
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| Course code | KFI/FVB |
| Organizational form of instruction | Lecture + Seminar |
| Level of course | Bachelor |
| Year of study | not specified |
| Semester | Summer |
| Number of ECTS credits | 5 |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Status of course | Compulsory-optional |
| Form of instruction | Face-to-face |
| Work placements | This is not an internship |
| Recommended optional programme components | None |
| Course availability | The course is available to visiting students |
| Lecturer(s) |
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| Course content |
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Provisional itinerary: 0. Intro meeting 1. Hic sunt dracones: life, mind and consciousness in the (post)scientific world 2. Vertiginous circularities: thinking life and living thought 3. Logics of life: autopoiesis and structural coupling 4. The great beyond: behaviour and (proto)cognition 5. In the beginning was the word: language and society 6. Ouroboric thought: knowing how we know 7. That liberating lighntess of being: between experience and science 8. Empty passing-through: cognitive science and the Buddhist selflessness 9. The mind became flesh: embodied and enactive cognition 10. The groundless grounds: everything, nothingness, and emptiness 11. Final discussion
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| Learning activities and teaching methods |
| Dialogic Lecture (Discussion, Dialog, Brainstorming), Work with Text (with Book, Textbook) |
| Learning outcomes |
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Course Title: Living Minds, Minded Lives: Francisco Varela's Biophilosophy (Sebastjan Vörös) Course Outline: The inception of modern philosophy and science has given rise to a schism that, in many respects, still determines how we view the world - the schism between nature, or objective reality, and mind, or subjective reality. After several ingenious attempts to reduce one of these poles to the other - nature to mind or, more frequently, mind to nature - proved inadequate, many authors started questioning the very framework in which the problem was posed. This led some (e.g., Bergson, Plessner, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem) to suggest that an important factor had been left out of the original epistemological picture, namely life. Their suggestion was that, despite many important developments in evolutionary and molecular biology, vital phenomena defy reductive explanation and that the 'logics of life' may serve as a middle ground between the two seemingly irreconcilable poles. The main goal of the course is to acquaint the students with the work of the Chilean biologist, cognitive scientist, and phenomenologist Francisco J. Varela (1946-2001), whose ideas about the autonomy of life, embodied nature of mind, and the significance of lived experience were all directed at bridging the mind-nature gap. The course will focus on a close reading and discussion of Varela's two seminal texts: The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding by H. Maturana and Francisco Varela, and The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. We will identify and analyze the key ideas, concepts, and hypotheses; critically compare them to the prevailing theories in contemporary biology and cognitive science; and juxtapose them to the ideas of other thinkers (mostly from the philosophical and philosophical-anthropological tradition). Special emphasis will be given on the following three aspect of Varela's work: (a) autopoietic theory of life, which characterizes living beings as autonomous self-producing beings, i.e., beings that, through a recursive operation of maintaining their own boundaries, determine their own conditions of existence; (b) enactive theory of cognition, which sees mind not as a repository of representations of the external world, but as a vehicle of sense-making, i.e., as a dynamic, embodied process of an ongoing synchronization with its environment; (c) investigation of lived experience, which emphasizes the importance of developing methodologies for rigorous study of the dynamics of experience and use them to complement methodologies used by natural sciences.
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| Prerequisites |
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unspecified
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| Assessment methods and criteria |
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Student performance
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| Recommended literature |
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| Study plans that include the course |
| Faculty | Study plan (Version) | Category of Branch/Specialization | Recommended semester | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2019) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: Summer |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2019) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: - |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2022) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: Summer |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2019) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: Summer |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2019) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: Summer |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2019) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: Summer |
| Faculty: Faculty of Arts | Study plan (Version): Philosophy (2022) | Category: Philosophy, theology | - | Recommended year of study:-, Recommended semester: Summer |