26/05/2026
This week we honour the 25th anniversary of the passing of Francisco Varela (September 7, 1946 – May 28, 2001), who remains one of the most visionary and influential figures in the history of cognitive science.
Varela studied biology at the University of Chile, before completing a PhD in biology at Harvard University. In the wake of the 1973 military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, he spent seven years in exile in the United States before returning to Chile as Professor of biology at the University of Chile. During this period, he immersed himself in the practice of Tibetan Buddhism, studying with Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, and later Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche. In 1986, Varela settled in France, teaching cognitive science, epistemology, and neuroscience at the École Polytechnique and University of Paris, and then serving as Director of Research at the CNRS in 1988. In 1987, he co-founded the Mind and Life Institute with Adam Engle and the 14th Dalai Lama, initiating a series of intimate dialogues that unfolded a sustained exchange between Buddhist contemplative traditions and contemporary science.
Through his pioneering empirical research and profoundly transdisciplinary theoretical work, Varela transformed how we think about mind and life. His book The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (1991), co-authored with Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson, introduced the "enactive" approach, proposing that mind and consciousness arise from dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. His earlier contributions, Principles of Biological Autonomy (1979) and The Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (1987, 1998), co-authored with Humberto Maturana, helped establish the concept of autopoiesis and reshaped our understanding of living systems as self-producing and relational.
We remember him with gratitude, not only for a mind that crossed boundaries with ease, but also for a legacy that continues to animate new ways of thinking about consciousness, life, and experience.
