People
Current Members
Josu Acosta
Javier Aguirre
Javier Belastegui
fjbelastegui@gmail.com
Javier Belastegui completed in 2021 his PhD thesis in Philosophy (sup. Dr. Thomas Mormann), on the topic of natural kinds. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI), under a contract with the UPV/EHU funded by the Basque Government. He will be spending the next two years as a visiting researcher at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). He is working on a project, supervised by Dr. María de Ponte, that applies the theory of conceptual spaces to the study of the formal structure of natural kinds. His research interests include anything involving formal models of similarity, properties and kinds. He is currently a member of the research group on Language, Action, and Thought.
María de Ponte
maria.deponte@ehu.eus
ILCLI Director
María de Ponte (Tenerife, Canary Islands) is an Associate Professor at the University of the Basque Country. Before, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Seville (2012-2018), a Juan de la Cierva Post-doctoral Researcher at ILCLI, and a Fulbright post-doctoral Researcher at Brown University. She works on the philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and time, and her works have been published in journals such as Journal of Pragmatics, Topoi and Logique et Analyse. She is currently a member of the research group on Language, Action, and Thought.
Beñat Esnaola
besnaola@protonmail.com
Beñat Esnaola has a B.A. in Philosophy (University of the Basque Country, 2018) and a M.A. in Cognitive Science and Language (University of Barcelona, 2019). He is currently working on a PhD on unarticulated constituents in language and thought under the supervision of Prof. Kepa Korta. His main research interests include unarticulated constituents, the philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics. He is currently a member of the research group on Language, Action, and Thought.
Enetz Ezenarro
Yolanda Garcia
Yolanda García-Lorenzo obtained her PhD in Linguistics from the University of the Basque Country with a dissertation titled "Irony-understanding and Theory of mind: A conceptual and experimental inquiry from a realist perspective" which was supervised by Kepa Korta and Fernando García Murga. Prior to that, she completed a MA in Cognitive Science and Humanities at ILCLI-University of the Basque Country (2015) and a BA in Spanish Language and Literature from the University of Santiago de Compostela (2013). Currently, she is a post-doctoral researcher (Basque Government fellowship) under the supervision of Joana Garmendia and Nausicaa Pouscoulous. She will be a visiting researcher at UCL from September 2023 to August 2025, where she will further explore her main research interests in irony, lies, literal and non-literal speech, developmental pragmatics and the cognitive abilities involved in pragmatic skills, all from a theoretical and empirical perspective.
Lorena Gil de Montes
inaki.heras@ehu.es
Iñaki Heras is Full Professor at the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU. Studied Business Studies at UPV/EHU and the ESST Society, Science and Technology Master at UPV/EHU and Roskilde University. PhD on Economics (Extraordinary PhD Award - UPV/EHU). Published more than 80 articles in JCR (WoS) ranked journals (e.g. Organization, International Journal of Management Reviews, Business Strategy & the Environment, Journal of Business Ethics). Likewise, published more than 20 books and reports on economics, management and public administration policies.
Jonathan Lavilla
jonathan.lavilla@ehu.eus
Jonathan Lavilla de Lera is an Assistant Professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU). Before he studied in the University of Barcelona, where he received a PhD in Contemporary Philosophy and Classical Studies (2014), a M.A. in Philosophy and Classical Studies (2010), a B.A. in Classics (2015) and a B.A. in Philosophy (2009). His area of interest includes rhetoric, Greek drama, Plato, Aristotle, and ethical and political problems of Ancient Greece. He is a member of Ethics in Communities of Practice research group (ETICOP-IT, GIU 18/140).
maibomhi@ucmail.uc.edu
Heidi Maibom (PhD London, CandPhil Copenhagen) is Ikerbasque Research Professor at the University of the Basque Country, Professor of Philosophy at University of Cincinnati, and President of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE). She works on empathy, emotions, moral psychology, psychopathology, responsibility, and meaning in life. She has written two books on empathy, Empathy (Routledge 2020) and Knowing Me, Knowing You (Oxford), edited The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (Routledge 2017), Empathy and Morality (Oxford 2014), and Neurofeminism (w. R. Bluhm & A.J. Jacobsen, Palgrave McMillan 2012), and published numerous papers in journals and collections. Maibom has previously held research fellowships at Princeton University and Cambridge University.
Mikel Olazaran
mikel.olazaran@ehu.es
Mikel Olazaran is a Senior Lecturer of Sociology at the University of the Basque Country. He has worked on topics such as science and technology, organization, innovation and education. Currently he is working on two projects: "SMEs and regional innovation systems" and "vocational training and innovation". His latest publications with his colleagues Eneka Albizu, Beatriz Otero and Cristina Lavía include: "BPR implementation in Europe: The adaptation of a management concept", New Technology, Work and Employment, 2006, 21:1, 43-58; "Technology transfer between technology centres and SMEs: Evidence from the Basque Country", European Planning Studies, 2009, vol. 17, no. 3, 345-363; "Co-operation in innovation: A qualitative study of industrial SMEs", Current Research, 2010, accepted; and "Innovación y territorio: una encuesta a pymes industriales"; Revista Internacional de Sociología, 2010, accepted. Since 2005 M. Olazaran is president of the Professional Association of Sociologists and Political Scientists of Navarre (Colegio Oficial de Doctores/as y Licenciados/as en Ciencias Politicas y Sociología de Navarra – Nafarroako Politologoen eta Soziologoen Elkargo Ofiziala).
luisangel.perez@ehu.es
Luis Angel Pérez Miranda (PhD in Philosophy) is a Senior Lecturer of Logic and Methodology of Science at the Department of Philosophy (UPV/EHU). His research interests include reasoning and argumentation in discourse, rationality and action theory, philosophical foundations of decision-making, and game theory.
Thom Scott-Phillips
Scott-PhillipsT@ceu.edu
Thom Scott-Phillips is Ikerbasque Research Associate. Humans are similar to other great apes in many ways, yet the few differences that do exist combine to generate languages, rituals, institutions, technologies, markets and other cultural and societal phenomena. The general question that motivates Thom's work is, how and why does this happen? Thom is especially focused on the case of communication and languages, on which he has published many theoretical and empirical papers. He is one of the world's leading experts in the origins and evolution of language.
Alain Ulazia
Irati Zubia
iratizubia11@gmail.com
Irati Zubia Landa has a BA in Philosophy (University of the Basque Country, 2019) and a MA in Philosophy, Science and Values (University of the Basque Country, 2020). She is currently doing her PhD on post-truth and bullshit, under the supervision of Dr. Joana Garmendia and Dr. Agustin Arrieta Urtizberea. Her main research interests include philosophical issues related to post-truth, the pragmatics of bullshitting, and their political and ethical implications
Visiting Researchers
apxar2@nottingham.ac.uk
Andrea Raimondi has a B.A. and a M.A. in Philosophy (University of Milan) and is currently a PhD student at the University of Nottingham (Department of Philosophy). Under the supervision of Prof. Stefano Predelli and Prof. Mark Jago, he is writing a dissertation on meaning attributions and the related topics of quotation and opaque contexts. However, his research interests cover also other fields. For instance, he has published two articles on, respectively, Millian theories of proper names (Topoi) and the notion of intentionality (Analysis), and he is researching on some applications of Nunberg’s theory of meaning transfers. He is currently visiting the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information, supervised by Prof. Kepa Korta.
Research Associate Fellows
Eduardo Alonso
eduardo@soi.city.ac.uk
Eduardo Alonso is a Reader in Artificial Intelligence at City University London and Research Associate Fellow at the ILCLI, specialising in studying interdisciplinary bridges between machine learning and animal learning. He has published dozens of papers and contributions to various volumes and edited several Springer LNAI and LNCS numbers and, in 2011, Computational Neuroscience for Advancing Artificial Intelligence: Models, Methods and Applications with IGI Global publishers. He served as vice-chair of The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, the eldest learned Artificial Intelligence society in Europe, from 2003 to 2006 and is a member of the Society for Computational Modeling of Associative Learning. He is also a member of the (British) Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council College. He is the co-founder and director of the Centre for Computational and Animal Learning Research. It all started at the ILCLI under the supervision of Prof. Larrazabal.
Mixel Aurnague
michel.aurnague@ens.psl.eu
Mixel Aurnague is a CNRS Research Director at Lattice (ENS - PSL & Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris). His research is concerned with lexical semantics of space and time tackled from a threefold perspective –descriptive, formal and experimental. He has (co)authored or codirected 9 books and dozens of papers on the following topics: formal representation of space in language; part-whole relations; internal localization nouns of French and Basque; prepositions, cases and prepositional expressions; categorization of spatial entities in language; spatio-temporal adverbials and structure of discourse; definition and classification of intransitive motion verbs of French; association of motion verbs and spatial PPs.
José Martínez
jose.martinez@ub.edu
José Martínez is a Research Associate Fellow at the ILCLI. Previously, he was a Visiting Researcher at the ILCLI with an Ikerbasque Fellowship. He studied Philosophy and Mathematics at the University of Valencia, where he got his Ph.D. in Philosophy. After two years as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, he joined the University of Barcelona. Since 2008 he is Professor Agregat (Associate Professor) at the University of Barcelona. He works in philosophical logic and his main areas of interest are the liar paradox, theories of truth, and many-valued logics. He has published several papers and contributions to various volumes on these topics.
Emeritus Honorary Fellows
Frantziska Arregi
hdpargof@sf.ehu.es
jesus.ezquerro@ehu.eus
Jesús Ezquerro was educated at the University of Salamanca. After 7 years teaching at this University, he joined the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of the Basque Country, where he was a Professor of philosophy of science until his retirement, in 2021. He was a researcher at ILCLI since its begining, and ILCLI director for many years. His research interests concern the philosophy of psychology/mind, cognitive sciences, action theory and natural language processing. He has published a number of papers on these topics. He is currently working on topics related to modularity, reasoning and social cognition.
Past Members
Xabier Arrazola
josebaxabier.arrazola@ehu.es
Xabier Arrazola (Legazpi, 1962 - Donostia, 2015) was a Senior Leturer of Logic at the University of the Basque Country. His work included all topics having to do with formal logic, specially semantics of modal and epistemic logics, and with the history and philosophy of logic in general. He authored a number of papers, and was responsible of the LogKCA Workshop.
Ibon Coteron
ibonkoteron@gmail.com
Ibon Coterón earned his PhD in Humanities and Cognitive Science at the ILCLI Institute under the direction of Kepa Korta. He teaches Philosophy and Psychology at a public High School in Erandio, Biscay (IES Ategorri BHI). He also has a Diploma of Advanced Studies in 'Logic and Foundations of Computational and Cognitive Sciences' (University of the Basque Country, department of Logic and Philosophy of Science). He got his BA in Philosophy with honours at Deusto University. His main interests are Logic and the Philosophies of Language, Action and Science.
Zvonko Díaz
zvonko.diaz@gmail.com
Zvonko Díaz has a B.A. in Philosophy (University of Basque Country, 2012) and a M.A. in Cognitive Science and Humanities: Language, Communication and Organization (ILCLI-University of the Basque Country, 2015). He worked on a PhD on the ontological structure of social obedience (focusing in the conceptual analysis of institutions, obligations and collective acceptance) under the supervision of Professor Manuel Liz and Dr. Kepa Korta. His main interests range from social ontology, collective intentionality and (political) action, to practical reason and meta-ethics.
Margarita Díaz
margaritadiazperez@gmail.com
Margarita Díaz has a B.A. in Philosophy (University of Seville, 2014) and an Inter-University Master in Logic and Philosophy of Science (University of Granada, 2016; module of Philosophy of Mind and Language). She worked on a PhD on aesthetic realism under the supervision of Dr. María de Ponte Azkarate and Dr. Fernando García Murga. The main aim of her research was to defend aesthetic realism through the analysis of aesthetics judgments.
aida_1104@hotmail.com
Aida Fernandez-Cotarelo got her PhD in Psychology in 2020 at the University of the Basque Country, with a dissertation entitled "The appreciative experience of dance as art: A conceptual and empirical investigation” under the supervision of Dr. Lorena Gil De Montes and Dr. Kepa Korta. She has a MA in Cognitive Science and Humanities (University of the Basque Country, 2015), and a BA in Psychology (University of Santiago de Compostela, 2013). She is currently working as a psychologist while pursuing a MA in General Sanitary Psychology. Her main research interests include Aesthetics and Psychology of Art mainly focusing on the experience of dance appreciation and what kind of properties, processes and capacities are relevant for dance understanding.
genovesi.c@gmail.com
Chris Genovesi received his PhD at the Institute of Cognitive Science (ICS) at Carleton University. His research interests include philosophy of language, pragmatics, figurative language, and the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur. He held a SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship at the ILCLI (2020-2022)
Mikel Haranburu
mikel.haranburu@ehu.es
Mikel Haranburu is a Honorary Fellow of Psychology at the University of the Basque Country. His work is focused on the study of personality, personality disorders, psychology of communication and learning difficulties. He has authored and coauthored several books and papers on personality psychology, self-concept, anorexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, health psychology, personality disorders, dysgraphia and phonemic conscience.
Pello Huizi
pello.huizi@gmail.com
Pello Huizi (Arano, 1942 - Bermeo, 2023), PhD in Psychology. He was a Lecturer of Psychology of Thinking and Language at the University of the Basque Country. He was also co-director of the first dictionary of psychology in Basque, Psikologia. Hiztegia. His research interests included psychology of reasoning, psychology of language, and also argumentation and emotion.
Jesus M. Larrazabal
jesus.m.larrazabal@gmail.com
Jesus M. Larrazabal (Zumaia, 1948 - Donostia, 2021) earned his degrees in philosophy and economics at the Universities of Paris-X, Valencia and UPV/EHU Bilbao. Master in Logic and PhD in Philosophy, he was Professor of Logic since 1992. He became interested in logic when he was between 16 and 18 years old, from his more fundamental interest in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of mathematical modelling in the social sciences. His research in logic began by doing model theory and working on the foundations of mathematics, and evolved over the years into the semantic applications of logic to natural language and to systems of cognition and action. After teaching logic at the School of Philosophy and Education of the UPV/EHU Donostia, he continued doing research on formal semantics, philosophy and foundations of formal sciences (logic, mathematics, computation theory), and philosophy and foundations of cognitive science, discourse analysis, and social action theory.
Anibal Monasterio
anibalmastobiza@gmail.com
Aníbal Monasterio Astobiza was a Basque Government Posdoctoral Researcher. His research lies at the intersection of the cognitive, biological and social sciences exploring their philosophical underpinnings. Currently, he is academic visitor at the Oxford-Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics (University of Oxford). He is a member of the group Kontuz! "Causal responsibility by omission: An ethical and legal elucidation of the problems of undue inaction (http://kontuz.weebly.com/ ) and the following research projects: (FFI2015-67569- C2-2- P) and (FFI2016-79000- P). Anibal graduated in Philosophy (Universidad de Deusto) before completing a MA in Social Psychology, and obtained his PhD in Cognitive Science and Humanities at the Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea with a dissertation on social cognition.