The article discusses the theoretical possibility of revealing the properties of autopoiesis and recursion in the canonical text of J. W. Goethe’s autobiography Dichtung und Wahrheit (“Poetry and Truth”), determines the formative role of autopoiesis in the development of autobiographical narration and interaction with the genre canon of autobiography.

Key words: autopoiesis, goethe, maturana, autobiography, canon, “dichtung und wahrheit”, recursion

Open peer commentary on the article “Maturanian Observer-Dependent Immunology” by Nelson Monteiro Vaz. Abstract: I highlight Vaz’s contributions to the field of immunology and the radical invitation of his proposal to think about the implication of the observer in the construction and investigation of immunology, as an object of knowledge, in language. Luiz Andrade

The article offers an analysis of a number of Russian studies of the work of Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), focusing on the understanding of religion as a special autopoietic subsystem of society. The authors describe the formation of “differences” in the religious sphere of social life and their “autopoiesis.” The first ideas about religion as the “faith” (“вѣра”) of the prince and the court elite are implicitly recorded from the 10th – 11th centuries in the context of “theological,” reflections on “true piety,” which, like “truth” and “law,” opposed “lie” and “lawlessness.” The term “religion,” generally accepted today, has been fixed in texts in Russian since the beginning of the 18th century, remaining rare until the second half of the 60s of the 19th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, it acquires about 20 meanings in a spectrum of connotations from the extremely sublime (“saving truth”) to the extremely profane (“opium for the people”) in the “atheistic” publications of the Soviet period, when the authorities begin to construct “communism” as a global perspective “universe of truth,” in which “atheism” must be established, and all religions must “die off.” Modern Russian religious studies “academically” describe the phenomenon of religion in a number of specialized research areas with its own distinctions of “true/false,” including understanding it as an “autopoiesis” of the beliefs of our fellow citizens and their communities as “actors” of communication processes that are part of the social subsystems of science, rights, media, etc. with its “atheistic/religious” distinctions. The publications of the 21st century discuss the variety of meanings of the Latin word “religio” and its derivatives, denoting both the infinitely complex and indescribable “extra-linguistic reality” of a person’s existence in the world, and local forms of “observing of the unknown,” reducing everything “unmastered” to the languages of the confessional “piety” and individual or group “vernacular religiosity,” which today can be understood “theologically,” “atheistically” or “academically.”

Key words: religion, atheism, russia, vernacular religiosity, analysis of differences, autopoiesis, n. luhmann

The philosophy of education faced challenges in the twentieth century that had derived from the challenges general philosophical thought had faced. The following sections introduce the first three main trends in the philosophy of education in the twentieth century (i.e., early prag- matism, “ism” movements, and analytic philosophy of education) along with the challenges these trends faced. Next, the new horizons for the twenty-first century are explained under the titles of new pragmatism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and constructivism. In the mean- time, new conceptions of knowledge and education along with the weaknesses associated with them are introduced and discussed.

Open peer commentary on the article “In Maturana’s Wake: The Biology of Cognition’s Legacy and its Prospects” by Randall Whitaker. Abstract: Influential texts are often long, complicated, dense, and difficult to read. While these texts have their place, it seems they are not utilized by the masses as frequently as content that is shorter, easier to understand, practical, and in a format that is more interactive. A proposal is made for practical applications of Maturana’s research to be presented in short videos to improve the understandability of his ideas while also increasing its popularity and value.

Open peer commentary on the article “The Maturanian Turn: Good Prospects for the Language Sciences” by Alexander V. Kravchenko. Abstract: I put forth some considerations about observation in the context of professional vision, or self-validating claims by experts to see in a way that is objective, or superior to that of everyday observers. I do so as a way to consider how Maturana’s biology of cognition is a way of understanding languaging that I find problematic. My response is just that, for I am advancing my own understanding of observers, biology, and cognition.

We introduce, motivate, and exemplify a proposed theoretical construct guiding the design and facilitation of collaborative geometry activities, conceptually generative perspectival complementarity (CGPC). Participants in CGPC activities learn content by negotiating their respective perceptions of situated features they manipulate to accomplish task objectives. We first ground our framework in sociocultural positions on disciplinary learning as educated perception. Next, we present and analyze empirical findings from three pilot studies of CGPC designs, where participants’ multimodal discursive efforts to coordinate their actions resulted in cognitively productive outcomes that we characterize as revealing either substitution, mutuality, or synergy of perceptions.

Organization figures centrally in the understanding of biological systems advanced by both new mechanists and proponents of the autonomy framework. The new mechanists focus on how components of mechanisms are organized to produce a phenomenon and emphasize productive continuity between these components. The autonomy framework focuses on how the components of a biological system are organized in such a way that they contribute to the maintenance of the organisms that produce them. In this paper we analyze and compare these two accounts of organization and argue that understanding biological organisms as cohesively integrated systems benefits from insights from both. To bring together the two accounts, we focus on the notions of control and regulation as bridge concepts. We start from a characterization of biological mechanisms in terms of constraints and focus on a specific type of mechanism, control mechanisms, that operate on other mechanisms on the basis of measurements of variables in the system and its environment. Control mechanisms are characterized by their own set of constraints that enable them to sense conditions, convey signals, and effect changes on constraints in the controlled mechanism. They thereby allow living organisms to adapt to internal and external variations and to coordinate their parts in such a manner as to maintain viability. Because living organisms contain a vast number of control mechanisms, a central challenge is to understand how they are themselves organized. With the support of examples from both unicellular and multicellular systems we argue that control mechanisms are organized heterarchically, and we discuss how this type of control architecture can, without invoking top-down and centralized forms of organizations, succeed in coordinating internal activities of organisms.

Key words: mechanismautonomycontrolheterarchyconstraintintegration

Excerpt: The evidence I have reviewed – showing the distributed, visual, and physical nature of mathematical understanding – seems particularly significant when considering that mathematics, for most students, is taught as a series of numbers and abstract concepts. It is probably not surprising that so many students feel that mathematics is inaccessible and uninteresting when they are plunged into a world of abstraction and numbers. Most curriculum standards and published textbooks do not invite visual thinking. Many textbooks provide pictures, but they do not invite students to think visually or to draw their own representations of ideas. When textbook and classroom approaches do encourage visual work, it is usually encouraged as a prelude to the development of abstract ideas rather than a tool for seeing and extending mathematical ideas and strengthening important brain networks.

Open peer commentary on the article “A Moving Boundary, a Plastic Core: A Contribution to the Third Wave of Extended-Mind Research” by Timotej Prosen. Abstract: I sympathize with Prosen’s conviction in integrating enactivism, the free-energy principle, and the extended-mind hypothesis. However, I show that he uses the concept of “boundary” ambiguously. By disambiguating it, I suggest that we can keep both Markov blankets and operational closure as ways of drawing the boundaries of a cognitive system. Nevertheless, from an enactive perspective, neither of those boundaries is a “cognitive” boundary.