People

Leonardo Bich is a ‘Ramon y Cajal’ Senior Researcher at the IAS-Research Centre of the University of the Basque Country (Spain). He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergamo (Italy), a ‘Juan de la Cierva’ research fellow at the University of the Basque Country (Spain), researcher and project PI at the at the Biology of Cognition Lab of the Universidad de Chile, postdoctoral fellow at the CNRS & University of Bordeaux (France) and visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh (USA). His research is focused on theoretical and epistemological issues related to biological organisation, autonomy, and control and on their implications for scientific debate in areas such as Physiology, Origins of Life, Synthetic and Systems Biology, Theoretical Biology and Cognitive Science.

Charbel N. El-Hani is full professor in the Institute of Biology, Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Coordinator of the History, Philosophy, and Biology Teaching Lab (LEFHBio) and the National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (INCT IN-TREE). Between January 2020 and July 2021, he was visiting researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. He works in the areas of philosophy of biology, ecology, ethnobiology and science education research.

Tim Elmo Feiten is a PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati in Philosophy and the Life Sciences. He works on the history and philosophy of science and brings it into dialogue with other fields, especially continental philosophy. His research uses the philosophy of embodied cognitive science to develop new readings of Jakob von Uexküll and Max Stirner and to ask questions about the relationships between art, science, technology, and society. He also studies data analytics, does research on public engagement with science, and pursues methodological questions about scientific modeling in biology and the social sciences.

IAS-Research Center for Life, Mind and Society. Department of Philosophy. University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU).

Andrea is Maria Zambrano fellow at IAS Research, University of the Basque Country (Spain) and associated member at the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie, UC Louvain (Belgium), where he was previously employed as a FNRS post-doctoral fellow and Marie Skłodowska-Curie individual fellow. He is into philosophy of science and German idealism, and does his best to argue it’s not schizophrenia. His current interests concern the relation between autonomy and cognition in complex adaptive systems.

Matteo Mossio is Chargé de Recherche (tenured) at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), full member of the IHPST,  Paris, France. He works mainly in philosophical and theoretical issues related to biological autonomy and,  in 2015, he published (together with Alvaro Moreno) a full monograph on this topic. Matteo Mossio took part in numerous research projects in France and abroad and he attended or organised over 90 national and international seminars, workshops, symposia and summer schools. Matteo Mossio supervised several PhD and Master students, and he regularly teaches in the Philosophy Program of the University of Paris 1 Panthéon – Sorbonne.

Yogi is philosopher of science, systems scientist, and evolutionary biologist with an extremely transdisciplinary track record. His investigations, first as the head of an empirical lab, later as the director of an institute for the philosophy of biology, then as a freelance philosopher and researcher, have always focused around a process perspective on the organism and its evolution. He is interested in fundamental questions such as the limits of (genetic) reductionism, dynamical systems modeling, and mechanistic explanation in biology. His current projects deal with the use of models as epistemic tools, with causality in complex adaptive systems, and with the nature of organismic agency and its role in evolution. Further info on ORCID and Google scholar.

Clarissa Leite is a postdoctoral researcher at the National Institute of Science and Technology in Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Studies in Ecology and Evolution (in Portuguese, Instituto Nacional de Ciência e Tecnologia em Estudos Interdisciplinares e Transdisciplinares em Ecologia e Evolução, INCT IN TREE). Currently, she is working on two lines of research: one of them is related to inter- and transdisciplinary practices developed by INCT IN TREE research teams, and the other one is related to organizational explanations of ecological functions. In the latter line of research, she is investigating the individuation of ecosystems as organizationally-closed systems in order to understand the intrinsic teleology resulting from the closure of constraints, as well as to provide non-arbitrary criteria for the identification of functional groups and traits. Her doctoral thesis was related to the occurrence of biodiversity thresholds in the Atlantic Forest and it was associated with a multitaxon study on the effects of the reduction of vegetation cover and historical biogeography on extinction thresholds. Full CV here.

Zoe is PhD candidate at the Sainsbury Laboratory in the University of Cambridge. In her current project, she is combining mathematical modelling and experimental work on the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana to understand how plants regulate their branching patterns throughout development. Beyond her work on plant development, her other interests include evo-devo, major evolutionary transitions, and the notion of biological individuality.

I am a PhD candidate at the IHPST. I completed a BA in Philosophy at McGill University and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. I have diverse interests in the history and philosophy of science but am particularly interested in questions which lie at the intersection of biology, history, and philosophy. My current research seeks to understand how advances in the life sciences have changed our conception of living beings and how this has impacted a wide range of philosophical debates.