I am very happy to announce the publication of Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual, edited by Arantza Etxeberria and me. This book is the unified and integrated result of our the research project of the same title lead by myself and Leonardo Bich that finished over a year ago. The book gathers a rich, cross-disciplinary exploration of autonomy that moves beyond the classic, self-sufficient, abstract, rational and detached model of the individual we inherited from modernity. Instead, it develops the concept of outonomy to capture how autonomy is constituted through relations: with environments, other agents, technologies, institutions, and social-ecological systems.
Why “Outonomy”?
Autonomy has long been central to modern thought, ethics, and the life sciences. But many contemporary debates across philosophy of biology, cognitive science, medicine, technology studies, and political theory show that the boundaries and concerns of the individual more far beyond itself. The outonomy framework responds to this situation by offering a more interactional and environmentally situated account of self-governance and normativity.
In the opening chapter, Barandiaran and Etxeberria outline 4 key properties that help articulate this shift:
Interactivity
Collectivity
Extensionality
Environmentality
Along two fundamental dimensions:
Integration
Sustainability
Together, these ideas reframe autonomy as something that emerges across scales of interaction and dependence, rather than something sealed within an isolated individual.
A structured journey across life, mind, technology, and politics
The volume is organized into four parts that build a coherent arc while engaging multiple domains:
Part I: Theoretical Insights Foundational chapters clarify the conceptual stakes of outonomy and rethink control and organization in biological systems.
Part II: The Fabric of Life Chapters address environments and asymmetries, the origins of life, reproduction, and a compelling application to menstrual health.
Part III: The Psychic Self and Its Environment Here the outonomy perspective extends into psychiatry, salutogenesis, and pain, emphasizing embodied and relational normativity.
Part IV: Technology, Ecology & Politics These chapters explore technocomplexity, the limits of autonomy in social-ecological systems, subjects-in-common, and mindshaping in relation to adaptive preferences.
Co-authored chapters
I have co-edited the book, and co-authores three chapters:
Barandiaran, X. E., & Etxeberria, A. (2026). Outonomy, the Very Idea. In X. E. Barandiaran & A. Etxeberria (Eds.), Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual (pp. 3–12). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_1
Here we introduce the concept of Outonomy as an attempt to overcome some of the limitations of the concept of autonomy as inherited from modernity.
Cabello, V., Merlo, A., Mancilla, M., Siqueiros, J. M., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2026). Autonomy and Its Limits in Social-Ecological Systems. In X. E. Barandiaran & A. Etxeberria (Eds.), Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual (pp. 121–130). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_12
In this chapter, we approach the notion of autonomy at its largest planetary scale. Social-ecological systems are in need of a deep exercise of autonomy as self-limitation and care if we are to avoid the increasing destruction of living diversity and flourishing life on earth.
Calleja-López, A., Pérez-Verdugo, M., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2026). Autonomy and Technology: From Instrumentalism to Technocomplexity. In X. E. Barandiaran & A. Etxeberria (Eds.), Outonomy: Fleshing out the Concept of Autonomy Beyond the Individual (pp. 111–120). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-05501-9_11
This chapter captures the dialectical moments that tie autonomy and technology, from the naïve, yet widespread, instrumental use to the techno-complex participatory constitution of our extended life, passing through the persistent thread of an increasingly autonomous techno-economic system that subsumes and alienates human autonomy.
A collaborative research effort
The book emerges from sustained work within the Outonomy research network and related projects, with authors actively reviewing and strengthening each other’s contributions. It also benefits from external reviewers who helped refine the final manuscript.
Why does a heart attack count as a malfunction, but a volcanic eruption doesn’t? What makes one failure meaningful while the other is merely an outcome of physical laws? This is a foundational question in philosophy. It conditions the nature of explanations in philosophy of science, the autonomy of biology, the concepts of adaptiveness, health or well-being, the possibility of meaning emerging in nature, or, ultimately, our own judgement.
At the most basic level, at the heart of biological explanation, lies the idea of function. Your heart functions to pump blood; your kidneys function to filter it. But the idea of function implies something deeper: that things can go wrong. If a function can succeed, it can also fail.
“There is no function if there is no room for failure or possibility of malfunctioning, otherwise the notion of function would add nothing to the mere description of a process,” (p. 2)
There are different accounts of (mal)function in the philosophical pool. Most classical theories of function fall into two camps: biostatistical and etiological. The first (Boorse) defines dysfunction as statistical deviance from the norm. The second (Millikan, Neander) grounds function in evolutionary history—traits fail if they don’t do what they were selected to do. An alternative to these accounts is the so-called organizational account. It states that a trait malfunctions when it fails to contribute to the self-maintenance of the system it belongs to, in the manner that other parts dynamically (functionally) presupposes it to do so. I have been discontinuously working on this theory since my MSc thesis (2002), then with Alvaro Moreno (2008), then with Ezequiel Di Paolo and Marieke Rohde (2009), and lastly with Mattew Egbert (2014).
The canonical definition of the organization approach to function is due to Mossio, Saborido and Moreno, to be latter reframed in Moreno and Mossio’s book “Biological Autonomy” in 2015. This paper is somehow a (very) late response to some problems inherent on their specific understanding of malfunction. I have named it the “dual-order” approach because it defines malfunction as a failure of a trait to respond to a regulatory command to switch between “regimes” of self-maintenance. I suggest we need to take a different route (advanced and formalized in Barandiaran and Egbert 2014). My alternative does away with the need for two orders of norms, and proposes a gradual (non-binnary) account of function. It analyses malfunction dynamically, in terms of how a trait’s activity aligns with what is minimally required for maintaining viability. I use the concept of a “normative field”—a gradient that specifies, at each point, how a variable (like heart rate or food intake) needs to change to avoid system collapse.
“A trait operates normatively when its effects on the viability space correlate positively with the normative field”. (p. 8)
With this approach, it is possible to distinguish between different types of dysfunction (see figure panel d):
Subfunction: the trait works, but too slowly or insufficiently.
Malfunction: the trait works against what’s required.
Nonfunction: the trait fails to operate at all when needed.
Fig. 2 Bifurcation diagram of a system, depicting the incoming food concentration [F] on the x-axis and the amount of internal metabolite concentration [A] on the y-axis. Subfigure a depicts the tendency of the system to two stable equilibria (solid lines), the death state at [A] = 0 and the viable state (top curved line), an unstable equilibrium is depicted with a dashed line. Tendencies of [A] are depicted with vertical arrows, with a constant supply of [F] the system at point r moves to the stable living or viable equilibrium, while departing from s it evolves to [A] = 0 and dies. Subfigure b displays a partition of the state space into Viable, Precious and Terminal regions derived from the tendencies of [A]. Subfigure c depicts the normative field as the positive change of [F] that is necessary at each point of the precarious region to avoid death. Subfigure d represents 4 different types of trajectories within the viability space: functioning or functional increase of [F] positively correlated with the normative field, malfunctioning modulation of [F] that is not correlated with the normative field and will eventually lead to death, non-functioning trajectories also lead to death by inactivity and subfunctioning trajectories are positively correlated with the normative field (pushing [F] to increase) but fail to save the life of the organism (see text for more details).
This classification captures biological nuance that the dual-order model cannot, such as partial failures within a single regime or regulatory dysfunctions at higher systemic levels.
What I offer is a more parsimonious, gradated, and inclusive framework. Rather than splitting the world into constitutive and regulatory norms, my approach captures both under a unified formalism. Biological systems, after all, are full of gradual regulation, not binary switches. Hormones, enzyme levels, and neuronal excitations rarely flip like light switches—they modulate, fine-tune, oscillate. In short, I argue, the Normative Field Approach provides a robust and flexible model for understanding malfunction.
I conclude with a short metaphysical exhort on the nature of functions that I feel tempted to turn into a full paper: “From an operational perspective, norms appear as conditions of possibility for the organism’s very existence—within an extended present (or across scales of extended presents) that sustain the organization anchoring those norms. This does not exactly render norms epiphenomenal; rather, it suggests an explanation that cuts across both epi- and sub-phenomenal levels. Normativity could be said to be epiphenomenal in the sense that it offers a higher-order normative description of system operations—descriptions that different parts of the system may or may not conform to, to varying degrees. At the same time, it is sub-phenomenal (and thus transcendental in the Kantian sense) insofar as it refers to modes of functioning among parts that constitute the very conditions of possibility for the system’s ongoing existence. For the system to exist as an observable entity here and now, the normative description must already have been satisfied.” (p. 16)
«it suggests an explanation that cuts across both epi- and sub-phenomenal levels.» (p.16)
This way of conceiving (mal)functions has consequences. Particularly if we are to avoid normalizing instrumentations of functionality and dysfunctionality (e.g. by claiming that somebody’s behaviour is dysfuctional because it deviates from statistical normality or from historical competitive selection) and favours instead a system centered, environmentally sensitive, open and singular account of function anchored on the autonomy of the system under care:
“[I]t is ultimately the autonomy of each living organization (in its open and interdependent singularity and becoming) that marks the horizon of normative judgements.” (p.16)
ABSTRACT: The notion of malfunction is critical to biological explanation. It provides a test bed for the normative character of functional attribution. Theories of biological functioning must permit traits to operate but, at the same time, be judged as malfunctioning (in some naturalized, nonarbitrary sense). Whereas malfunctioning has attracted the most attention and discussion in evolutionary etiological approaches, in systemic and organizational theories it has been less discussed. The most influential of the organizational approaches (by Saborido, Moreno, and Mossio) takes a dual-order approach to malfunctions, as a set of functions that fit first-order constitutive norms but fail to obey second-order regulatory ones. We argue that this conception is unnecessarily complicated (malfunctions do not need to arise as a result of two conflicting orders of norms) and too narrow (it excludes canonical cases of malfunctioning). We provide an alternative organizational account grounded on viability theory. The dynamics of the traits that constitute an organism define the normative field of its viability space: sugar must be replaced at a certain rate, blood must be pumped at a certain pace, and so on. A trait operates normatively when its effects on the viability space correlate positively with the normative field. Three senses of dysfunctionality might be distinguished: subfunctional operations are those that positively correlate with the normative field but quantitatively fail to match the required speed; malfunctional operations are those that do not positively correlate with the normative field; and nonfunctional traits either don’t operate at all or operate with null effect on the normative field.
I am pleased to share with you a recent publication co-authored with Alex Merlo. The paper is an important first step in Alex’s PhD thesis of exploring the politics of the earth system from the point of view of philosophy of science. The paper touches upon classical topics of autonomous and enactive approaches to life and mind, but at a scale that has rarely been the focus of our analysis: thermodynamics at the planetary scale. For those of you interested in climate change, thermodynamics and life, or, from a philosophy of science perspective, on «extremum principles» (maximum entropy, etc.), I think the paper has a lot to offer. It also has important political implications. We have been motivated to debunk fatalism, which is almost a kind of zeitgeist among many today. Reactionary postmodern authors like Nick Land, who rest the collective mind on the accelerator of turbocapitalism, are among our covert targets. But generally, the paper builds systematic arguments against all those approaches that leave human and biological agency at the corner of maximimization principles (with alleged thermodynamic foundations): «there is nothing we can do to stop our fate but to accelerate or decelerate the inevitable increase of entropy». It turns out, we argue, that what characterizes life on earth (that it, the only life we know) is its capacity to organize thermodynamic gradients to increase the diversity and frugality of life. It is time we also start to do so.
Merlo, A., & Barandiaran, X. E. (2024). Beyond fatalism: Gaia, entropy, and the autonomy of anthropogenic life on Earth. Ethics in Science and Environmental Politics, 24, 61–75. https://doi.org/10.3354/esep00213
ABSTRACT: The current disruption of ecosystems and climate systems can be likened to an increase in entropy within our planet. This concept is often linked to the second law of thermodynamics, which predicts a necessary rise in entropy resulting from all material and energy-related processes, including the intricate organisation of living systems. Consequently, discussions surrounding the ongoing crisis commonly carry an underlying sense of fatalism when referencing thermodynamic principles. In this study, we explore how the understanding of life has been harmonized with thermodynamics to show that entropy production is a consequence of heightened complexity in life rather than its breakdown. Furthermore, it is crucial to perform a thermodynamic analysis of the Earth system as a whole to dispel fatalistic assumptions. The extremum principles linked to thermodynamics do not foretell the precise evolution of complex organisations but rather set the thermodynamic boundaries associated with their development. Ultimately, treating the Earth system as an integrated autonomous entity in which life and human societies play pivotal roles is essential for charting a sustainable path forward for humanity. Understanding how to contribute to thermodynamic states that are more conducive to life, rather than hastening the journey towards disordered states, is paramount for human survival and well-being in the Anthropocene era.
Xabier E. Barandiaran 