The next session of the IAS Seminar will take place this Friday, 27th of March at 1pm. Centro Carlos Santamaria, Room TBA. The talk will be hybrid, to participate remotely contact: alberto.monterde@ehu.eus

Our speaker will be Andrea Gambarotto (Université du Luxembourg), who will present: Science, society, and the normativity of science governance

Abstract

The paper argues for an integration of the theoretical legacies of Lewontin and Varela with regard to the role of organismal agency in evolution. Our main claim is that such an integration is necessary to develop a unified dialectical biology. Lewontin foregrounds reciprocal determination between organism and environment, while Varela emphasizes internal organization that sustains biological individuality. We stress how many criticisms of the ecological-agential perspective inspired by Lewontin in the philosophy of biology arise from its insufficient articulation of the organizational basis of agency. The organizational account issued from Varela’s work grounds agency in the adaptive and regulatory capacities of autonomous systems that allow them to modulate their metabolism and behavior in response to changing environmental cues. We extend this perspective to the evolutionary domain by introducing the notion of cross-generational regulation: the feature of an autonomous system charged with biasing development in adaptive ways. What is conserved across generations, we argue, is not merely organizational closure, but regulated closure: the stable yet plastic patterns through which the organism actively maintains its coupling with the environment. The resulting picture reframes evolution as the historical expression of organismal autonomy, in which biological individuals are not merely objects of natural selection, but also subjects whose adaptive capacities contribute to enact their evolutionary trajectories.

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.