‘Life’ is manifest in autonomous being in a contingent world and ‘natural life’ is life that has developed autonomously in that its becoming has not depended on prior agency. Autonomous being requires the capacity of autopoiesis and the maintenance of autonomous being in a contingent world requires the capacity of intentional agency. Also, autonomous and diverse becoming requires the capacities of accidental creation and reproductive evolution in an environment of contingent events. These capacities may be explained in theories of functional organization, each of which may be variously realized in the physical domain.

This article aims to explore the philosophical basis of classical radical constructivism (Piaget, Glasersfeld, Maturana) in the light of migration issues, with a general interest in the issue of housing theory (space) and the recent generated debate about constructivism therein. Thus, the article investigates three aspects of constructivism. First, the sense of ‘realm’ and, therefore, the notion of reality and realism in relation to both a physical world and a notion of knowledge or, more specifically, to what isknowledgeable; second, the problem of the so-called theory-laden issue, that is, the operational basis of theories; and finally, naturalism or, more specifically, the fact that there is a domain of actual things, a form of present, which always acquires a status in relation to government and/or State’s and corporate authorities. What interest us in this context is to propose a conceptual alternative with which to think through the notion of migration considered, in the context of humanities and social sciences, where a relativist sense of knowledge has been pushed to the extreme. We will also explore the consequences of the interactions between migration considered as a physical domain and as a conceptual domain.

Key words: epistemology, housing theory, humanities, migration, radical constructivism, social sciences.

The concept of autopoiesis, amended as a system theory, is necessary and sufficient to provide an operational definition of life, a set of criteria by which the living are categorically distinguished from the non-living. Limitations are placed on the domains in which autopoiesis may be exhibited.

Key words: Autopoiesis, physical domain, physical realization of autopoiesis, system logic of the living

Zelený and Hufford apply the criteria of autopoiesis 1) to Leduc’s osmotic systems to claim that certain non-biological physical systems are autopoietic, and 2) to ‘the human family’ to claim that spontaneous social systems are autopoietic. I find, first, that the authors fail to show either kind of system to be autopoietic, and further, that their claimed success at showing autopoiesis derives from fundamental problems of logical types: in confusing system levels (discrete system components as distinct from the unitary whole) and in conflating system domains (physical, biological, and social). Finally, I contend that by its criteria autopoiesis is restricted to systems in the physical domain – that is, components, transformations, and production in autopoiesis are necessarily physical. While spontaneous systems in the social domain may be marked by relationships among its members (and may even be organizationally closed), they are not autopoietic.

Key words: Autonomy, autopoiesis, autopoietic criteria, living systems, osmotic systems, social systems. spontaneous social systems, system domains, system levels

My purpose in this essay is to explain cognition as a biological phenomenon, and to show, in the process, how self consciousness originates in language, revealing the ontological foundations of the physical domain of existence as a limiting cognitive domain. In order to do this, I shall start from two necessary experiential conditions that are at the same time my problem and my explanatory instruments, namely: a) that cognition, as is apparent from the fact that any alteration of the biology of our nervous system alters our cognitive capacities, is a biological phenomenon that must be explained as such; and b) that we, as this essay will demonstrate, exist as human beings in language, using language for our explanations. These two experiential conditions are my starting point because I must be in them in any explanatory attempt; they are my problem because I choose to explain them, and they are necessarily my instruments because I must use cognition and language in order to explain cognition and language. I propose not to take cognition and language as given unexplainable properties, but to take them as phenomena of our human domain of experience that arise in the praxis of our living, and as such deserve explanation as biological phenomena. It is also my purpose to use our condition of existing in language to show how the physical domain of existence arises in language as a cognitive domain. I intend to show that the observer and observing, as biological phenomena, are ontologically primary with respect to the object and the physical domain of existence.