The next session of the IAS Seminar will take place this Friday, 27th of February at 1pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room 4. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact: alberto.monterde@ehu.eus
Our speaker will be Vincenzo Politi (Universidad de Sevilla), who will present: Science, society, and the normativity of science governance
Abstract
Several contemporary philosophers challenge the traditional ‘social contract’ between science and society, arguing in favour of an ‘alignment’ between scientific research and socially desirable aims and values. Although they reach opposite conclusions, however, both the traditional social contract and the new alignment ideal share the same presupposition: namely, that the science/society relationship is indeed a two-player game, with both ‘science’ and ‘society’ threated as homogeneous and monolithic entities. In reality, science is embedded in a wide societal tangle, whose components interact with one another in complex ways. Among the elements of the societal tangle there are so-called ‘boundary organizations’, that operate in the space between the executive branches of a government and research conducting organizations. Such boundary organizations develop so-called science governance frameworks. Inasmuch as they dictate what scientific research ought to be about and how it ought to be carried (if it wants to receive public funding), science governance is normative. Philosophers of science customarily deal with normative claims about science; therefore, they may also be well equipped to analyse science governance frameworks. In this talk, I will focus on a specific case, namely a recent shift in the science governance strategy of the European Commission (EC). During the multi-year funding programme ‘Horizon2020’ (2014-2020), EC promoted a governance framework called Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI). In the current funding programme, ‘HorizonEurope’ (2021–2027), references to responsible research have been omitted, with EC now primarily advocating Open Science (OS). As I will explain, RRI and OS rely on conflicting normative views about scientists’ responsibilities and roles. The philosophical analysis of the governance frameworks developed by boundary organizations may help uncover contradictory presuppositions and ideals shaping science policy, as in the case discussed in this talk. This, in turn, may help us reframe some of the current debates about the relationship between science and society.
On February 20th, 2026 1pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room 4. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact: alberto.monterde@ehu.eus
Marius Werz will be presenting his recent publication “From functon to freedom: enactivism between being and becoming“, published in Phenom Cogn Sci.
Abstract
Enactivism is undergoing a metaphysical shift. In pursuit of a more open-ended account of organismic becoming, several theorists have turned to the “affirmationist” ontologies of Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze. These frameworks conceive becoming as a non-teleological process in which identities emerge as contingent actualizations of pre-individual fields. In this paper, I argue that this turn is metaphysically incompatible with enactivism’s foundational commitments to self-organizing organismic totalities. As an alternative, I develop a metaphysical framework that preserves these commitments while dispensing with functionalist assumptions immenent to contemporary enactivism. I begin by establishing enactivism’s metaphysical alignment with Marxist dialectical materialism. This renders enactivism’s functionalist outlook more legible and clarifies its tensions with affirmationist metaphysics. From here, I turn to Hans Jonas’s account of life, which I reinterpret as resisting the reduction of purpose to organizational maintenance. For Jonas, life grounds meaning, affect, and activity in the dynamic structure of living form, rather than in its instrumental functions. This reorientation offers enactivism a renewed foundation for theorizing purposiveness, autonomy, and change.
On November 14th, 2025 1pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room 5. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact: alberto.monterde@ehu.eus
Abstract
This presentation examines whether the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) – the theoretical proposal aiming to integrate diverse areas of biology within an evolutionary perspective – should be regarded as an extension of the Evolutionary Synthesis (ES) or as a fundamentally distinct theory. To address this question, we employ Imre Lakatos’ methodology of scientific research programmes and reconstruct both ES and EES in Lakatosian terms.
Our analysis focuses on identifying and comparing the ‘hard cores’ – i.e. the core theoretical commitments – of the two programmes in order to determine whether EES can be understood as part of the same programme as ES or as a divergent one. We argue that EES cannot be adequately described as a simple extension of ES. Rather, it constitutes a distinct research programme, structured around its own hard core and heuristic principles.
A further question concerns the relation between these two programmes and Darwin’s original theory. We suggest that there was no fully developed Darwinian research programme preceding the ES, although the ES formed around Darwin’s central contributions: the explanation of evolution by natural selection and the principle of descent with modification. However, the ES also abandoned several of Darwin’s proposals concerning heredity. By contrast, EES reopens some of these questions in light of advances in epigenetics, developmental biology, and ecology. In this sense, EES may be seen as recovering several Darwinian insights within a more flexible and pluralistic theoretical framework than the gene-centred and comparatively rigid structure of the ES.
We are happy to announce the Third Forgotten Female Bodies Workshop: Views from Enactivism and Evo-Devo. This international meeting will bring together scholars from different disciplines to explore how feminist perspectives intersect with philosophy of biology, cognitive science, and embodied approaches.
One-Day workshop
Donostia, 26 September 2025 Batzar Aretoa – Sala de Juntas (HEFA I)
Speakers:
Anna Ciaunica (Univ. Lisbon) Enara García (Univ. Southern Denmark) Laura Mojica (EHU) Laura Nuño de la Rosa (UCM) Mihaela Pavlicev (Univ. Vienna)
Organizers:
IAS Research Group for Life, Mind and Society Alejandra Martínez-Quintero, David Cortés-García & Arantza Etxeberria
Program:
10:30-10:45
Welcome coffee & Reception
10:45 – 11:00
Arantza Etxeberria & Alejandra Martínez-Quintero
Short welcoming address
11:00 – 11:45
Laura Nuño de la Rosa Chair: Arantza Etxeberria
Is Sex a character? Modularising sexual differences
11:45 – 12:30
Anna Ciaunica Chair: Ezequiel Di Paolo
The Forgotten Body: The Emergence of Conscious Experiences in Early Life
12:30 – 12:45
Short Break
12:45 – 13:30
Laura Mojica Chair: Ezequiel Di Paolo
Implicated Recognition and the Grounding of Normativity
The Path-Dependent Mind: Individuation, Vulnerability, and the Ontogenesis of Mental Conditions
16:30- 17:00
Final thoughts and open debate Chair: David Cortés-García
Abstracts
Laura Nuño de la Rosa: Is Sex a character? Modularising sexual differences
Debates about the concept of sex often stall because sex is treated as a property of individuals rather than of characters. I challenge such definitions and instead propose analyzing how sexual characters are individuated in evolutionary biology. Using pregnancy and female orgasm as case studies, I compare selectionist and evo-devo criteria, highlighting their strengths and limits. Viewing sex as an attribute of developmentally individuated characters explains why sexual traits are only loosely correlated, enables explanatory generalizations across species, accommodates continuous variation, and provides a coherent framework for intersex and hermaphroditic individuals.
Anna Ciaunica: The Forgotten Body: The Emergence of Conscious Experiences in Early Life
The search for the neural correlates of consciousness has been influential in the past decades. Yet, tackling the fascinating question of the emergence of early subjective experiences through an individualistic, adult-biased, and neuro-centric lens may be misleading. The key idea is that developmentally speaking, one must first examine how cells (and not just neurons) operate in tandem to sustain the self-organisation of the human organism as a whole. Here I argue that the hard problem of consciousness cannot be addressed without putting the forgotten body back into the picture. This includes the necessary presence of the other body (i.e. the pregnant person) too, without which the fascinating journey of conscious life wouldn’t be possible tout court.
Laura Mojica: Implicated Recognition and the Grounding of Normativity
A central challenge in explaining cognition is showing how normativity is grounded beyond individuals’ self-individuation and immediate interactions. A common strategy appeals to social practices, but it remains unclear how they ground normativity. Without such an account, references to practices risk circularity in grounding meaning, skill, and value. I argue that recognition provides the solution, not only as rational attribution or shared intelligibility, but also as an implicated, dialectical interaction in which self and other are sustained and transformed. Drawing on enactive epistemology, I situate recognition within a virtual field where even fleeting encounters presuppose the other’s potential for deeper, transformative interaction.
Mihaela Pavlicev: Integrity of eutherian feto-maternal interface
Eutherian pregnancy is an intriguing phenomenon, as its evolutionary origin required circumventing a number of biological “rules” otherwise considered necessary to maintain the integrity of an organism. These novel “circumventions” entail attachment and breaching of the epithelium with inflammation, yet without rejection by the innate immune system, maintaining an open wound over prolonged period of time, and overcoming of the allograft rejection. I will talk about a novel way to think about one of these novelties, namely the ability of maternal and fetal cells to organize into a common tissue unit.
Enara García: The Path-Dependent Mind: Individuation, Vulnerability, and the Ontogenesis of Mental Conditions
The enactive approach to mental conditions offers an alternative to neurocentric, static models, adopting a processual and relational ontology of mind and its disorders. Proposed as a framework for individualized dynamic network models, it highlights tensions with network theories that emphasize synchronic explanations (causal, mechanistic, topological). Instead, enactivism advocates an ontogenetic explanation, viewing conditions as entwined with developmental individuation. This paper proposes integrating ontogenetic explanations into network models through propensity-based accounts. Incorporating developmental processes fosters dynamic, preventive, and vulnerability-based paradigms in psychiatry, aligning with the principles of neurodiversity and “forgotten minds”.
Friday, June 27 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 5. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com
Prominent theories of language evolution suggest that the flexibility and open-endedness of human communication relies on the ability to form and recognise communicative intentions. The origins of this idea can be traced to the work of Paul Grice, who proposed that the meaning of an utterance depends on an audience’s recognition of the intentions with which the utterance is produced by a speaker. However, a lively debate continues about the cognitive basis of communicative intentions, their presence in animal communication, and their explanatory role in theories of human language evolution more generally. In this talk, I review current debates on the role of communicative intentions in language evolution, focusing on ‘expressive communication’ (EC) proposals (e.g., Bar-On 2013). Engaging empirical research on cognitive development and gestural communication in great apes, I argue that EC-proposals should spell out in more detail how embodied norms underlie expressive, communicative interactions, and propose that the notion of sensorimotor norms, as developed within the enactive approach (Di Paolo et al. 2017), provides a promising theoretical framework for this task. Finally, I sketch some implications of this proposal for thinking about the embodied foundations of communicative intentions and their role in theories of language evolution, to be addressed in future work.
Bar‐On, D. (2013). Origins of Meaning: Must We ‘Go Gricean’? Mind & Language, 28(3), 342–375. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12021 Di Paolo, E. A., Buhrmann, T., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2017). Sensorimotor life: An enactive proposal. Oxford University Press.
Friday, June 13 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com
Limit situations, such as trauma, illness, or existential crises, fracture the anticipatory structures that sustain the basic trust required to navigate the world. These functional structures serve as a pre-reflective substrate of certainty, enabling the organism to interact fluidly and meaningfully with its environment. Limit situations expose the inherent fragility of the patterns of sense of world and self (sense-making), triggering organic imbalances, disruptions in sensorimotor agency, and ruptures in socially negotiated norms. However, the experience of limit situations and the challenge they pose to fundamental trust do not necessarily entail collapse. Rather, they may give rise to resilient responses. These responses emerge through dynamic processes of reorganization that modulate habits, norms, and practical orientations across three interconnected levels. At the organic level, disruption may lead to adaptive reorganization, where states of “malfunction” (such as chronic pain) are metabolized into new viable equilibria, showing the organism’s capacity to cultivate renewed trust in its bodily processes. At the sensorimotor level, loss of fluidity can prompt bodily relearning through active engagement with the environment, restoring embodied agency. At the social level, the rupture of shared meanings can be addressed through the co-construction of flexible norms that validate diverse adaptive responses, thereby rebuilding intersubjective trust. These reorganizations entail active participation, ongoing involvement, and situated assessment of existential vulnerability, aiming not merely to restore but to redefine trust. In this light, a theory of resilience grounded in the interplay between limit situations and the re-establishment of trust is framed as a relational, multi-level achievement. It redefines mental health not as a fixed state of normative functioning, but as an ongoing process of contextual coordination, participatory agency, and sustained capacity to reorganize meaning under precarious conditions.
Friday, May 16 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 5. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com
In this talk, I examine the various ways in which researchers have thought about the continuity of life and non-life in the context of the origin of life. Specifically, we look at the role that continuity thinking has played in shaping and legitimizing origins of life research as a scientific field during the 20th century. We show there was a shift in continuity thinking in the middle of the 20th century. While the purpose of the principle of continuity during the first half was to oppose vitalism, its purpose in the second half was to oppose miraculism – the idea that the origin of life was so improbable that it was akin to a miracle. This shift is reflected in the views which challenged scientific research into the origins of life in each respective period. Despite this change, the notion of continuity continued to serve a legitimizing role in origins of life research: it turned the origin of life from an inscrutable mystery to a scientifically legitimate problem. We argue that the shift had two sources, the perceived obsoletism of vitalism and the introduction of the stepwise, chemical, and experimental approach that came to dominate origins of life research.
Friday, May 9 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com
Legal philosophers have historically debated whether the interpretation of written statutes should pay closer attention to a law’s literal meaning or to the purpose that gave rise to its enactment. In this talk, I review various strands of empirical evidence that offer an emerging picture of the cognitive science of legal interpretation. These studies demonstrate that, across cultures, people vary widely in their tendency to favor a rule’s letter over its spirit when asked to apply written rules, and experience cognitive conflict when textualist and purposivist interpretations are incongruent. Evidence from speeded response paradigms and incentivized economic games suggests that the prevailing tendency toward textualism arises as judges resolve this cognitive conflict: specifically, by overriding the intuitive tendency to consult their personal moral values in order to arrive at a coordinated interpretation that matches that of other legal officials and society at large.
Friday, March 14 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 3. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com
Over the decades, organismalism has received little historical consideration. Recently, this trend has been inverted, sparking an explosion of organismal studies. However, the latter have been prone to a central limitation: their exclusive and all-engulfing emphasis on synthesizing and analyzing the particularities of specific biological principles. Admittedly, several valuable historical studies have amended this bias, revealing that organismalism was a bio-theoretical and not exclusively biological movement. In this talk, I will elaborate on these ideas by shedding light on the connections between organismalism and pragmatism. I will argue that there is a common thread linking them that revolves around the idea of “experience”. This concept allowed the latter to articulate their respective biological and philosophical intuitions, positioning themselves as “third ways” to mechanicism/vitalism and realism/idealism, respectively. I will illustrate how this concept was gradually shaped through cross-pollination between particular proto-organismal (E. D. Montgomery and J. S. Haldane) and pragmatist authors (J. Dewey).
Friday, February 28 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 3. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com
The research programme ‘basal cognition’ adopts an evolutionary perspective for studying biological cognition. This entails investigating possible cognitive processes in ‘simple’–often non-neuronal–organisms as a means to discover conserved mechanisms and adaptive capacities underwriting cognition in more complex (neuronal) organisms. However, by pulling in the opposite direction of a tradition that views cognition as something that is unique to neuronal organisms, basal cognition has been met with a fair amount of scepticism by philosophers and scientists. The very idea of approaching cognition by way of investigating the behaviour and underlying mechanisms in, say, bacteria, has been seen as preposterous and harmful to both cognitive science and biology. This paper aims to temper such scepticism to a certain degree by drawing parallels with how the evolution of ‘development,’ another loaded concept that refers to a not-so-easily definable, contested bundle of phenomena, has been fruitfully approached in Evolutionary Developmental Biology (Evo-Devo). Through this comparison, we identify four promising features of the basal cognition approach. These features suggest that sweeping scepticism may be unwarranted. However, each of them comes with important epistemic cautionary notes that should not be disregarded. By presenting these twofold considerations as potential ways to integrate a fully evolutionary perspective into basal cognition, this paper seeks to provide clarity and direction for the advancement of this research programme.
