The public defense of the doctoral thesis Life in History: Beyond Biology, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Sciences took place on April 17, 2026, at 12:00 noon, Spanish mainland time, in the A. Calsamiglia Degree Room.

The research was supervised by Professor Raquel Bouso García and received external evaluation reports from Manuel Heras Escribano and Raúl Fornet-Betancourt. The examination committee was composed of Raúl Fornet-Betancourt — RWTH Aachen University —, Enrique Del Percio — University of Buenos Aires —, and Natàlia Cantó Milà — Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

The text that follows reproduces the statement prepared for the defense. It presents the intellectual itinerary that led to the thesis, sets out its main hypothesis, and summarizes the argumentative shift it proposes: moving from an understanding of life centered on self-organization, autonomy, and the immanent production of meaning toward a conception of life as constitutive openness to exteriority, in critical dialogue with Varelian enactivism, phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, and the philosophy of liberation.

Defense Statement

Good morning. I would like to thank the members of the committee for their presence and for the time they have devoted to this work, as well as Professor Raquel Bouso for her guidance throughout this research.

Before presenting the thesis, I would like briefly to situate the intellectual itinerary from which it emerged.

For several years I lived in Asia, devoted to the study of Buddhist philosophy and to contemplative practice. That experience confronted me early on with problems concerning cognition, experience, and the transformation of the subject, but also with the question of the status of the real and its ethical and political implications.

Upon my return to the West, in the early years of the 2000s, those concerns were reformulated in a more philosophically systematic way in an initial research project centered on the constitution of modern identity and on the tensions among subjectivity, normativity, and history.

In the following decade, after returning to Latin America, my encounter with the philosophy of liberation decisively reoriented that horizon toward an ethical and political critique of modernity, compelling me to reconsider the problem of the subject from the standpoint of exteriority, domination, and the concrete historicity of social life. It was within that framework that I studied more closely the relationship between human rights and neoliberalism.

That turn deepened at the beginning of the present decade through the study of Marx, especially through Enrique Dussel’s reading of his work. From there emerged a new research project aimed at clarifying the relationship between dialectics and realism from the perspective of liberation.

My current research, centered on Varelian enactivism, stands in continuity with that trajectory. At the same time, it constitutes a first opportunity to critically interrogate the Tibetan Buddhism in which I was formed and some of its contemporary reformulations, largely mediated by categories drawn from the Anglo-American world, analytic philosophy, and the cognitive sciences, with special emphasis on the ethical-political implications of their presuppositions. It is precisely at the intersection of these concerns that the research I present today is situated.

The thesis is titled Life in History: Beyond Biology, Phenomenology, and the Cognitive Sciences.

It argues that contemporary realism cannot be sufficiently grounded in a purely epistemological reflection. If today we continue to ask about the real, it is not simply because we do not know whether there exists a world independent of us, but because we need to understand how that which exceeds us can impose itself upon our experience as a demand and an address, without depending on our operations of meaning-constitution. This question cannot be adequately resolved as long as life continues to be thought from within a paradigm of immanent self-organization. For that reason, the thesis proposes a decisive shift: to understand life not primarily as self-organization, but as constitutive openness to exteriority. Only from this shift can a realism with ethical and political scope be articulated.

The research emerges from a central difficulty in contemporary thought. For decades, an important part of philosophy and the cognitive sciences attempted to overcome the modern dualism between subject and world, mind and body, interiority and exteriority. That task was necessary and fruitful. But the abandonment of dualism did not necessarily lead to a real openness to the other. Frequently, it instead produced a reinscription of alterity within increasingly sophisticated horizons of immanence. The world and others ceased to appear as mere external objects of representation, but they did not thereby become more real in a robust sense. Often, they came to be thought as correlates of a relational dynamic, as products of coupling, or as an enacted domain of meaning. And although this turn overcomes decisive aspects of representationalism, it leaves open a fundamental question: how are we to think a reality capable of wounding, interrupting, and obligating without being reduced to the internal logic of a living system or a network of interactions? That, essentially, is the problem that organizes this research.

My point of departure is not nostalgia for a classical metaphysical realism. The aim is not to restore the idea of a fully given, transparent, self-sufficient world simply lying there, waiting to be copied by a neutral mind. Nor is it a matter of denying the contributions of phenomenology, theoretical biology, or the contemporary cognitive sciences. The question is different: whether these currents, in their effort to abandon modern representationalism, are able to think an irreducible exteriority — that is, an exteriority that is not merely a functional moment in the constitution of meaning, but the very origin of history, ethics, and politics.

To address this question, the research follows an indirect path. Rather than formulating from the outset an alternative ontology of life, it concentrates on one of the most sophisticated contemporary attempts to overcome modern dualism: the enactivist tradition of Varelian lineage. This choice does not respond to a merely historiographical interest, nor does it seek to intervene in specialized debates within the cognitive sciences, although it does engage them. Its function is methodological. Enactivism offers a privileged site from which to observe how contemporary thought attempts to think cognition as an embodied, situated, and relational process without falling back into the classical schema of representation. Precisely for this reason, it allows us to see clearly both the power and the limit of an ontology of life founded on self-organization.

My methodological hypothesis can be formulated as follows: a philosophical paradigm reveals its limits not only when it manifestly fails, but when it reaches its most coherent formulation. In that sense, enactivism is not, for this thesis, a minor adversary, but the most demanding case. I have not sought to question it from the outside, caricature it, or oppose to it an already settled metaphysics. On the contrary, the work attempts to follow it from within, reconstruct its genealogy, make explicit its achievements, and show the point at which its own internal coherence reveals a structural difficulty. The critique is not directed against contingent shortcomings, but against the conceptual limit that appears when meaning is thought exclusively from the standpoint of autonomy and participation.

The thesis is therefore organized in three moments: first, the reconstruction of the conceptual genesis of the enactivist paradigm; second, the analysis of its most recent development; and, finally, the shift toward an ontology of exteriority, in dialogue with the philosophy of liberation, in order to reformulate from there the problem of realism.

Allow me now to pause over the reconstruction of the enactivist paradigm. In it I distinguish three fundamental movements. First, the critique of representationalism, that is, the rejection of the idea that knowing consists in internally reproducing a previously given world. Second, the notion of autopoiesis and autonomy, which makes it possible to think the living being not as an entity passively adapted to an external environment, but as a system that actively institutes a domain of relevance on the basis of its own organization. Third, the thesis of the relational emergence of meaning, which in later developments expands toward a participatory and intersubjective understanding of its production.

It would be a mistake to minimize the scope of this movement. Enactivism articulates a profound critique of dualism, representationalism, the disembodied mind, and abstract objectivism, while revaluing the lived, situated, and normative character of cognition. For that very reason, my reading does not attempt to discredit it as a whole. The thesis acknowledges these achievements and takes them as its point of departure. But precisely at that point the tension I wish to show appears: although the paradigm overcomes central elements of Cartesianism and representationalism, it remains inscribed within an immanentist closure of meaning.

Where does this difficulty appear? It appears where autonomy, which at first makes it possible to understand the genesis of meaning, simultaneously introduces a form of closure. If what is significant for an organism depends on its organization, its couplings, and the conservation of its identity, then every relevant exteriority can appear only as something integrated or integrable into the system’s dynamics. The other thus ceases to appear as an irreducible constitutive instance and becomes instead a functional moment within a network of relations whose ultimate intelligibility still depends on self-organization.

This is the central critical thesis of the work. My argument is not that enactivism ignores interdependence, vulnerability, or the relational character of experience. In fact, it places all of these at the center of its reflection. What I am pointing to is something else: by grounding life in self-organization, enactivism finds it extremely difficult to explain how a normative demand can arise that does not derive, in the last instance, from the system’s own dynamics or from coordination among systems. In other words, it can explain with great precision the emergence of meaning, the stabilization of local normative dynamics, and even phenomena of participation, mismatch, rupture, or transformation. But it encounters difficulties when it must think an exteriority capable of imposing itself as a demand before being integrated into an economy of meaning.

It is here that the problem of realism reappears, although no longer in its traditional form. The question is not, first of all, whether something exists outside us, but whether it is possible to think a reality capable of addressing the living being without being absorbed by its conditions of constitution. As long as the debate is formulated exclusively in epistemological terms, the answer will remain insufficient. For what is decisive is not simply whether the world exists, but whether there is something in it — or, better still, in the very relation of life to the other — that precedes, exceeds, and judges our configurations of meaning.

It is at this point that the thesis introduces the ontological shift of its positive proposal. My hypothesis is that this difficulty cannot be resolved through an internal expansion of the paradigm of self-organization. It is not enough to make the notion of interaction more complex, nor to intensify the idea of participation, nor to describe more finely the mismatches of coupling. What is required is a modification of the point of departure. Instead of understanding life primarily as a system that produces itself, I propose to think it as an existence open, from the beginning, to that which exceeds it.

This reformulation requires precision. It is not a matter of denying the autonomy of the living being or the processes of self-organization that characterize living beings, but of relativizing their ontological priority. Life is not exhausted by self-production. It is not grounded in an operational closure that would only subsequently open, in a secondary manner, to relation. More radically, the very identity of the living being is traversed from the beginning by exposure, vulnerability, and openness to the other as a constitutive condition. Life is not only organized persistence; it is also susceptibility, affection, and wound: the possibility of being interrupted by what it does not control.

This point is decisive because it makes it possible to reformulate the problem of realism. The real no longer appears as that whose existence must be demonstrated to a doubting subject, but as that which can interrupt our dynamics of meaning, overflow our frameworks of intelligibility, and impose itself as a radical demand. In this context, realism does not designate a return to a metaphysics of self-sufficient substances, but the recognition of an irreducible exteriority that precedes our syntheses and manifests itself originally not as a neutral object, but as a call, as a claim, and as responsibility.

Within this framework, the dialogue with the philosophy of exteriority becomes decisive. In the thesis, this shift is articulated especially through Levinas and Dussel. What I find in them is not simply an ethics added to an already given ontology, but a transformation of the very concept of reality. Alterity is not one more content of experience, nor one entity among others, nor a variation within the field of what can be thematized. It is that which overflows every totality of meaning. Precisely for this reason, responsibility does not appear as a supplementary normative layer, but as an originary dimension of life itself.

It is here that the philosophy of liberation enters the argumentative heart of the work: not as a Latin American appendix added to an already constituted European or North American debate, but as the place from which the problem of exteriority becomes visible in its full historical and political density. In Dussel, alterity is not only an abstract ethical category, but the concrete other, the victim of the totality, that whose existence refutes the self-sufficiency of the system and calls its legitimacy into question. Incorporating this standpoint also transforms the debate on realism. The real is not simply that which resists representation, but also that which resists functional integration.

Perhaps I can express this even more directly. If life is understood primarily as self-production, the real remains subordinated to an economy of meaning. If, by contrast, life is understood as exposure to what exceeds it, the real reappears not as a brute object, but as that which interrupts, demands, and judges. Hence my claim that contemporary realism cannot be resolved on strictly epistemological terrain. The decisive question is no longer how we cognitively secure access to the world, but how we philosophically think a life capable of responding to that which it has not produced.

The main result of the thesis can be summarized as follows: the question of the real is not ultimately decided within the restricted domain of knowledge, but in the way we understand life itself. This requires recognizing that what is decisive in life is not only its capacity to produce meaning, but also — and above all — its capacity to be reached and addressed by that which exceeds it. At this point, the problem also has a religious dimension, because the closure of the immanent frame and the denial of exteriority concern not only epistemology and politics, but also the way modernity has thought its relation to transcendence. To think life from exteriority does not mean restoring a religious metaphysics, but reopening the question of that which overflows every totality and can appear as a demand for truth, justice, and responsibility.

Thank you very much.

Selected bibliography

Di Paolo, E. A., Cuffari, E. C., & De Jaegher, H. (2018). Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language. MIT Press.

Dreyfus, H., & Taylor, C. (2015). Retrieving Realism. Harvard University Press.

Dussel, E. (1974). Método para una filosofía de la liberación. Sígueme.

Dussel, E. (1998). Ética de la liberación en la edad de la globalización y de la exclusión. Trotta.

Dussel, E. (2006). 20 tesis de política. Siglo XXI.

Levinas, E. (1961). Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité. Martinus Nijhoff.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. D. Reidel.

Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1984). El árbol del conocimiento: Las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano. Editorial Universitaria.

Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Harvard University Press.

Varela, F. J. (1979). Principles of Biological Autonomy. North Holland.

Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.

Related works by the author

Cincunegui, J. M. (2010). Charles Taylor y la identidad moderna [Tesis doctoral, Universitat Ramon Llull]. TDX. https://hdl.handle.net/10803/9226

Cincunegui, J. M. (2019). Miseria planificada. Derechos humanos y neoliberalismo. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2024). Mente y política. Dialéctica y realismo desde la perspectiva de la liberación. Dado Ediciones.

Cincunegui, J. M. (2026). La vida en la historia. Más allá de la biología, la fenomenología y las ciencias cognitivas [Tesis doctoral, Universitat Pompeu Fabra]. TDX. https://hdl.handle.net/10803/697505