Antonine Nicoglou (Université de Tours, France) Plasticity in the Life Sciences : Genealogy of a concept to mapping its contemporary significance

Antonine Nicoglou is a lecturer in philosophy affiliated with the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tours. She is also a member of the Inserm research laboratory Imagin Brain and Neuropsychiatry, UMR 1253.

As a researcher within the Experimental and Translational Psychiatry team, she has developed a research project on the Origins and Uses of Animal Experimentation in Biopsychiatry (ANR-22-CE54-0004-01). Since 2023, she has been a member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

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The use of the term plasticity has a rich and enduring history in the context of understanding and studying living organisms. Its roots can be traced back to Antiquity, with the term plastikos appearing in Aristotle’s writings on nature.

As biology emerged as a distinct scientific field during the Enlightenment, the notion of plasticity evolved alongside it. However, as biology grew more precise concepts – such as embryonic, phenotypic and developmental plasticity- began to take shape. Despite this specialization, the broader, more ambiguous use of the term persisted among biologists, often serving as a bridge between disparate fields to explain the inherent variability of living organisms.

To illustrate this, I will focus on a specific example: the concept of plasticity in neurobiology. This field exemplifies the dual movement of specialization and unification, where plasticity is both narrowly defined and broadly applied. In this presentation, I will explore the links and tensions between the generalist understanding of plasticity in living organisms and its more specific applications in neurobiology, shedding light on the conceptual and practical implications of this duality.