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 |
| 13:30-15:00 | Lunch break | |
| 15:00 – 15:45 | Mihaela Pavlicev Chair: Alejandra Martínez-Quintero | Integrity of eutherian feto-maternal interface |
| 15:45-16:30 | Enara García Chair: | 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”.
