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This chapter explores the philosophical foundations of ecocentrism, in particular its ontology. It explores the idea of a unity of humanity and nature and the proposition that ecological ‘laws’ should inform human morality. Does the quality of autopoiesis endow that natural world with intrinsic value? Can ecocentric principles offer guidance for human behaviour?

Moves away from explaining the comparative statics of risk regulation regimes and explores what happens when regimes are under pressure to change, and, in particular, when they are under presure for greater openness and transparency. The chapter develops a style‐phase model of staged organizational responses to external pressure for change and compares its predictive value against two competing hypotheses. Examination of the nine case‐study risk regulation regimes reveals that, contrary to the common belief that such pressures are all pervasive, less than half were exposed to substantial pressures of this type. Responses of organizations in the ‘high‐pressure’ regimes were varied, but the overall pattern was consistent with a mixture of an autopoietic and staged‐response hypothesis stressing blame prevention. The chapter presents a hybrid ‘Catherine‐wheel’ model of the observed pattern and concludes by discussing the implications for policy outcomes.

This chapter provides an extensive review of the biochemistry literature on the origins of life where the concept of autocatalysis figures most prominently. There is a lively debate in the scientific literature between scientists who subscribe to an RNA-first hypothesis and scientists who subscribe to a metabolism-first hypothesis about the origin of life. Both are different versions of autocatalysis, and a sensible conclusion could be that biological life really took off when a symbiosis developed between the two. After that, the chapter reviews past formal modeling in this area, which is spotty but highly suggestive. The chapter identifies Eigen's and Schuster's model of hypercycles as the path-breaking work that first placed empirical chemistry and formal models into fruitful dialogue with each other. Finally, the chapter reviews a less successful, more philosophical descendant of autocatalysis called autopoiesis, which is the guise under which autocatalysis first was presented to social scientists.

This chapter brings together insights drawn from Indo-Tibetan Buddhist and enactivist accounts of the self. It examines the Buddhist theory of non-self and the reductionist formulation developed by Abhidharma Buddhism. After discussing some problems for Buddhist reductionism, it examines enactivism in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. It is argued that human beings, being characterized by a high degree of self-organizing autonomy, are not reducible to the mental and physical events that constitute them. Varela's enactivist account of the self as virtual and his use of Buddhist ideas are critically examined. It is argued that, while the self is emergent and constructed, it is not merely virtual. Finally a non-reductionist view of the self as self-organizing process is defended. This is grounded in the recursive processes that characterize lived experience at various levels. In Buddhist terms, this chapter develops an account of the self as empty, but nevertheless real.

This chapter compares the continuity theory that I propose with the other theories available in today’s immunology, including the self-nonself theory, the systemic theory of the immune “network” (Jerne), the autopoiesis framework (Maturana, Varela, Coutinho), the self-organization theory (Cohen and Atlan), and the danger theory (Matzinger). I emphasize the aspects that the continuity theory borrowed or inherited from these theories, as well as the many aspects on which it differs from them. I show that some frameworks elaborated to understand the immune system are not genuine scientific theories, but rather mere “viewpoints” on immunity. I insist that no framework has, up to now, succeeded in taking into account the importance of both innate immunity and immune tolerance – two aspects that are at the center of the continuity theory.

This chapter follows the influence of Locke's chapter ‘On Identity and Diversity’ through to the 1790s and beyond, taking in the Lockean games of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Hartley, Barbauld, Priestley, John ‘Walking’ Stewart, and Hazlitt. Rather than privileging unity, this organic identity values integrity and is tested by experience. It works to make connections through ‘self-consciousness’, Locke's term for an awareness of a continuing responsible personhood through life. Still drawing on this tradition, the recent theory of autopoiesis has described a mechanical organic linking computers and biology. In place of ‘unity’, this organic explores how elements of association, aggregation, juxtaposition, mixture, and superimposition work to keep living systems alive.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a background to current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition. The first section of this introductory chapter by George Rousseau reflects on current research in Enlightenment and Romantic studies on topics related to distributed cognition, while the second section by Miranda Anderson considers how the various chapters in this volume advance work in this area. The thought-world of the long eighteenth century involves notions of flux between mind, body and world, mind-life and subject-object structural couplings, sympathetic circulations, mind metamorphoses and manacles, and texts, performances and artefacts as cognitive aids or modes of access to other minds and past phenomenologies.

This chapter explores the ways in which Sterne in Tristram Shandy may have anticipatedaspects of the concepts of 4E cognition. It sets Sterne into his historical-philosophic milieu, especially in the dualist traditions of Locke and Hume, and seeks to understand how Sterne’s narrative and its protagonist are living systems embodying cognitive worlds. Autopoiesis, the term used to describe systems capable of maintaining and reproducing themselves, is shown to be applicable to Sterne’s creation of a protagonist who cannot figure out who he is or how he got to be where he is. The chapter particularly emphasizes the runaway digressive loops driving Tristram’s cognitive mindset and demonstrates how the continual perturbations he experiences whenever he tries to get outside his own head disturb his self-organization. It shows that when Tristram aims to traverse the autopoietic borders he has set for himself, as he often does, he becomes progressively disturbed.

This chapter examines production regimes and their idiosyncracies, with particular reference to the co-evolution of economic and legal institutions in the varieties of capitalism. It first considers two theories that explain the institutional varieties of capitalism, namely, the theory of production regimes and the theory of institutional co-selection. It then looks at the theory of self-organising social systems as well as its critique of the theories of production regimes and co-selection. It also discusses the theory of autopoietic social systems and its emphasis on self-organisation and self-reproduction, together with the multi-polarity and cyclicity of production regimes. The chapter concludes by outlining the main assumptions of autopoiesis theory, focusing on just-in-time contracts in the United States and Germany.

Although the European Community was initially focused on economic concerns, culture and its protection, along with other matters that include human rights and the notion of citizenship, soon emerged as growing concerns at Maastricht. In contrast to other culture-related issues that were perceived to be encompassed by structural funds and other such legal categories, cultural rights were integrated more easily. As such, Cultural Title XII was able to establish culture's more distinct role. This final chapter attempts summarize and draw together the important notions derived from the previous chapters. Also, using the theory of autopoiesis in approaching various interfacial issues, this chapter attempts to clarify the relationship between law and culture as expressed within the European Union.

This book is based on research that explored the history of miscarriages of justice and of attempts to adopt effective measures to remedy these from early in the nineteenth century to the present. Two strands of theory have informed this research: the autopoietic systems theory and Guido Calabresi and Philip Bobbitt's classic work Tragic Choices. The theory of autopoiesis was developed by Niklas Luhmann and Gunther Teubner. The book focuses in particular on the devices used by England's Court of Appeal (Criminal Division) to maintain the legal system's integrity. A parallel with criminal justice can be suggested; it is that the values of truth (a correct verdict) and fairness (due process and rights), with justice as an implied amalgam of the two, are priceless. The history of criminal appeals can be re-examined as a response to problems of tragic choice: the conflict and allocation of fundamental values within criminal justice. A process of appeal allows inevitable outcomes (miscarriages of justice) to be seen as mistakes, and rectified.

This chapter focuses on the autopoiesis of life and the future of organisms. It discusses various autopoietic theories of embodied life, and explains Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's claim that the experience of death is the essence of life. The chapter argues that these theories of embodiment, and autopoietic theory in particular, cannot account for unbounded and disembodied life because it is impossible to think of life which makes its way through the world without a thought of sustainability and which is blindly active and mutational.

Legal closure implies diverse but interconnected understandings of law. This chapter sets out to defend the utility of a sociological perspective, or set of perspectives, on legal closure. It distinguishes two approaches to legal closure: normative closure and discursive closure. The aim here is not to show that conceptions of normative or discursive legal closure are misguided in the particular contexts in which these conceptions have been developed, but that they can be reconsidered in a broader sociological perspective. Such a perspective ultimately denies that law is adequately understood as a ‘closed’ system, knowledge field, intellectual discipline, or discourse. But it recognises the social conditions that may make law so appear, or which seem to impel the ‘legal’ to seek to achieve ‘closure’ in a variety of ways. Viewed sociologically, legal closure can be treated primarily as a means by which various forms of legal or political practice attempt to enhance their own legitimacy. Autopoiesis theory, developed in relation to law by Niklas Lubmann and Gunther Teubner, postulates a form of legal closure as radical as any to be found or implied in the literature of legal philosophy.

This chapter briefly explores the potential mechanisms underlying a transition from inanimate matter to life. First of all, the structure of a minimal cell is discussed, according to chemoton theory and autopoiesis. A summary of current theories about the origin of life on Earth then follows: starting from the formation of organic compounds in a prebiotic world, various hypotheses have been formulated about how these basic building blocks could have been combined into self-replicating and evolving structures that can be considered alive. Three of these hypotheses are covered: RNA World hypothesis, the Iron-Sulfur World, and the Lipid World. The chapter is concluded with an overview of Artificial Chemistries intended to study minimal cells and the origins of life, such as autocatalytic sets and autopoietic protocells.

This chapter explores the system concept, which refers to the totality of structures (institutions) and rules (procedures) that place political and social actors (parties, associations, organizations, individuals) in rule-guided interactions with one another in order to fulfil system-preserving functions and reproduce them constantly in a circuit-like manner. Complexity is the raison d’être of system construction. If one were to try to describe society as a whole, one could not get around the sheer multiplicity of constitutive elements and their possible relationships. System-theoretical approaches to social change, e.g., by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, shed light on the interrelations between the functional requirements of socio-economic systems and the formation of social and political structures that meet these requirements. The example of the economic system illustrates that transformation as a consciously designed process of system change is possible only within narrow bounds. The recursive structure of relationships within the system and the linkages with the environment generally prevent a sensible intervention from the outside or a cybernetic control from the inside over highly complex processes.

This chapter attempts to model protocell production under the general perspective of autopoiesis. An example of an autopoietic system is a living cell that is capable of self-generation and self-reproduction using energy derived from its environment. This chapter investigates how, and under what conditions, an autopoietic protocell can emerge. It focuses on the lattice artificial chemistry (LAC), computational system that is used to model autopoietic protocells.

This chapter proposes a theory that explains how human evolution is energized. More specifically, it describes a mechanism that shows the process of autopoiesis in which the earliest hominids became modern Homo sapiens. To this end, it considers how humans were able to maintain the high level of selectiveness needed for speedy evolution without falling apart as a species. It also examines how evolutionary change is connected to the creation of variation, the mechanism by which variation is brought about, and how stress-induced mutation enabled humans to domesticate selectiveness. Finally, it discusses the so-called ratchet principle, the notion of fleeing forward as an adaptive response that brings about a new regime of selectiveness, and how this adaptive response must have transmuted into what might be termed “hyperadaptation”.

Birds comprise one of the most storied figural sites in Anglo-American poetry—and particularly in the Romantic genealogy that runs from Keats’s nightingale, Shelley’s skylark, and Poe’s raven to the birds that appear centrally in many of Wallace Stevens’s most important poems. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, this chapter will explore how in the bird topos of Stevens, the lines of animal studies and posthumanism cross in a way that subordinates the problem of the animal other to a more radically inhuman or ahuman otherness that is not limited to animal and human bodies, but in fact “traverses the life/death relation” (to use Derrida’s phrase). And this fact, in tandem with Derrida’s speculations on Heidegger and Defoe in the The Beast and the Sovereign, enables us to understand the peculiar quality of Stevens’s “ecological” poetics.