Varela F. J. (1979) Autonomy and biological thinking (Chapter 1). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 3–7. https://cepa.info/4108
Varela F. J. (1979) Autopoiesis as the organization of living systems (Chapter 2). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 8–18. https://cepa.info/4109
Varela F. J. (1979) Embodiments of autopoiesis (Chapter 4). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 24–29. https://cepa.info/4111
Varela F. J. (1979) On the consequences of autopoiesis (Chapter 6). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 41–49. https://cepa.info/4113
Varela F. J. (1979) Operational explanations and the dispensability of information (Chapter 8). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 63–69. https://cepa.info/4115
Varela F. J. (1979) Symbolic explanations (Chapter 9). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 70–82. https://cepa.info/4116
Varela F. J. (1979) The idea of organizational closure (Chapter 7). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 50–60. https://cepa.info/4114
Varela F. J. (1979) The individual in development and evolution (Chapter 5). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 30–40. https://cepa.info/4112
Varela F. J. (1979) The nervous system as a closed network (Chapter 15). In: Varela F. J. (ed.) Principles of biological autonomy. Elsevier North Holland, New York: 238–259. https://cepa.info/4437
Varela F. J. (1981) Autonomy and autopoiesis. In: Roth G. & Schwegler H. (eds.) Self-organizing systems: An interdisciplinary approach. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt/New York: 14–24. https://cepa.info/2063
Excerpt: I hope to do the following: first, offer a characterization of what an autonomous system is, or rather what mechanisms endow a system with a degree of autonomy; second, to apply this characterization to three cases of relevance; third, to offer some remarks on the issue of formalizations of these ideas; forth, and finally, I shall conclude with some comment about the relation between autonomy and cognitive phenomena.
German: Schmidt S. J. (ed.) Der Diskurs des Radikalen Konstruktivismus. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Frankfurt: 119–133, 1986.