Emerging in the early 1970s from the collaborative work of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, the theory of autopoiesis fundamentally redefined life not as a static condition but as an ongoing process of self-production, operational closure and structural coupling, offering a powerful conceptual tool for understanding autonomy and cognition from within the organisation of the living itself; derived from the Greek auto (self) and poiesis (creation), the term captures the generative logic whereby a system produces its own components recursively, including the very boundary that individuates it, thereby maintaining both its unity and its distinct identity through time and perturbation; in contrast to allopoietic systems that generate external products, autopoietic systems enact their own continuation through an internal nexus of regenerative processes, a principle that Maturana and Varela first outlined in De Máquinas y Seres Vivos (1972) and later expanded in the influential Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), where they linked this biological organisation directly to cognition, not as symbolic representation but as effective, embodied action—summarised in the axiom "all doing is knowing, and all knowing is doing"; a pivotal case in point is the cell, whose metabolic network constructs the membrane that encloses it, maintaining its autonomy without referencing an external goal, thus exemplifying the core autopoietic triad: self-regeneration, boundary constitution, and operational unity; the theory arose in dialogue with second-order cybernetics (von Foerster) and positioned itself against representationalist paradigms, arguing instead for a co-constructed reality emerging through structural coupling between organism and environment, where the observer is always already embedded; this conceptual apparatus profoundly influenced fields as diverse as social systems theory (e.g. Luhmann), enactivist cognitive science, and organisational theory, marking a shift from reductionist or vitalist accounts to a non-reductive biology of autonomy that foregrounds recursive organisation as the minimal condition for life and knowledge, thus leaving an enduring legacy for epistemology, systems thinking, and the philosophical understanding of livingness itself. Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. J. (1980) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company. (Original Spanish edition: 1972/1973).