Margherita Bianchi received with honours both her Bachelor’s degree in Metaethics (2016) and Master’s degree in Philosophy of Life Sciences (2019) from the Department of Philosophy of the University of Rome “La Sapienza.” In 2019, at the same department, she started her doctoral research with a fellowship to write a thesis on the philosophical implications of plant cognition. Margherita Bianchi’s research aims to develop a multidisciplinary theoretical framework to think about the behavioural and cognitive capacities of the plants, i.e., sessile organisms lacking a nervous system, identifying the most promising epistemic tools and theoretical approaches. Among the main objectives is to outline a new and pluralistic conceptual apparatus for articulating and understanding plant activities, with a view to devising a processual, systemic-relational, and both biologically and ecologically informed conception of cognition. The relevance is twofold: to be able to stimulate research on plant capacities, and to provide links with different fields of research, related to the comparative analysis of the types of perception, action, memory, learning, anticipation, cognition and mind, as these capacities occur among different organisms in nature, thereby expanding and critically integrating theoretical and practical analysis. Currently, her main areas of interest are cognitive science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, epistemology, and biosemiotics.

selected publications

2023 – Plant cognition. Challenges and horizons in philosophical reflection

2023 – Il concetto di rappresentazione nelle scienze cognitive classiche e post-classiche. La sfida della cognizione vegetale

2023 – Riflessioni corali nell’analisi interdisciplinare sul concetto di rappresentazione nella cognizione vegetale

2022 – Network and ramifications: Relational perspectives in plant cognition

2021 – La vita ramificata: cognizione e comportamento nelle piante fra scienza e filosofia