Undergraduate thesis tries to, on the basis of Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s autopoietic theory, answer the question “What is life?”. It shifts the description of living beings on systemic terms, where the focus is not neither on the physical aspect of biological life (the biochemical properties of the organism), neither is it on metaphysical terms such as teleology; the emphasis is on the circular organization of living systems, that are primarily deemed in their unitary characterization, from which the emergent properties that are typically found only on the global level of the system, are explained. This thesis also turns an eye to two problematic themes, which are: the role of autopoetic theory between the opposition of reductionism and vitalism; and the role of a scientist in autopoetic theory.
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