History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences最新文献

Marine stations have long been explored by science and technology studies (STS) and the humanities as boundary objects between the field and the lab. However, through their position, they embrace rather three domains which have been separated by the modern organization of knowledge-sea, science, and society-not only epistemically, but also physically. In contrast to time-limited marine expeditions or pure laboratory work, marine stations enact "science with their feet in the water" while situated within concrete local societies. Therefore, many marine stations provide multiple ways of valuating the relation between the sea and society. However, in an era of considerable polarization regarding a sustainable future for coastal communities, valuating marine knowledge is a socially complex endeavor. Based on a five-month ethnography of the world's oldest existing institution of this kind, the Station Marine de Concarneau in Brittany, France, this paper discusses its practical enactment of heterogeneous values associated with marine knowledge. The paper, first, introduces the Concarneau station, its particular research profile, and its local exposure. Second, an experimentalist approach based on pragmatism and STS is explored in order to rethink current research on the valuation of socio-marine cohesion. Third, two types of valuating marine knowledge through heterogeneous collaborations at the station are explored: a) socio-technical and b) socio-epistemic. Finally, the paper deduces the importance of marine stations for inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration within the global transformation of sea-society relations.

This paper investigates the enduring philosophical challenge of how a living organism may be understood, through the epistemological perspectives of Immanuel Kant, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Rudolf Steiner. Kant's analysis of the necessity of judging organisms as purposive and self-generating wholes is presented as foundational to any systematic account, insofar as it addresses the very conditions under which an organism can become an object of cognition. However, due to Kant's strict separation of sensory intuition from conceptual understanding, he regarded purposive self-generation as merely heuristic, lacking causal legitimacy within empirical nature. In contrast, Goethe's participatory and intuitive method, articulated in The Metamorphosis of Plants, integrates empirical observation with imaginative reproduction to achieve an intuitive grasp of an organism's life and transformation. Conceived as a dynamic bridge between perception and concept, Goethe's approach was subsequently interpreted and philosophically developed by Steiner. Steiner argued that an organism's essential nature can be apprehended through a productive, intuitive mode of cognition that mentally reconstructs the organism's formative principles and self-generative force. His position, which bears affinities to Fichte's notion of intellectual intuition, both elucidates and extends Goethe's method by asserting that the organism's formative force is accessible through active, intuitive cognition. Thus, Steiner demonstrated how Goethe's approach transcends Kant's limitation on the knowability of organic life, enabling the empirical observation of spiritual efficacy in material nature. This paper ultimately contends that the Goethe-Steiner method offers an empirical yet intuitive framework and method for understanding the life and formation of living organisms.

This position paper explores the artistic value that can be attributed to the ocean through works of art. The starting point is the economic argument used in ocean conservation, which is based on the concept of ecosystem services (ES), primarily considered as goods and services the ocean provides to society. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we briefly discuss the successes and limitations of this concept and the potential role of artistic value in relation to it. We then examine three case studies of contemporary artworks produced between 2015 and 2021, closely tied to marine natural sciences. Through these works, we explore how contemporary art can potentially operate within the ES framework, while also surpassing it through the specific type of value it induces in the ocean. Each of the case studies exemplifies a type of tangible engagement that art can provoke towards the ocean: (1) creating "embodied knowledge" of scientific understanding of the ocean (Nicolas Floc'h), (2) raising awareness through awe (Irene Kopelman), and (3) shaping a different type of concern for marine animals and their environments (Joan Jonas). Finally, through a critical analysis, we argue that a serious consideration of an artistic value attributed to the ocean can serve to place social points of reference that bridge canonical scientific knowledge with a diversity of other types of narratives related to it, thus contributing to a shift towards a new paradigm for supporting ocean conservation.

Microbes emerge as the protagonists of new scientific narratives of the deep-sea, functioning as life-givers in biological communities or central actors in geochemical cycles essential to the functioning of the Earth system. This paper aims to address the significant discrepancy between present-day scientific knowledge and popular narratives of the deep, with a particular focus on the narrative representation of deep-sea microbes. In the face of looming deep-sea ecocide, it is crucial to incorporate knowledge of the microbial 'unseen majority' into our ecological imagination and challenge the 'size bias' towards larger organisms. However, problematic narratives-such as portraying the deep-sea as a barren place, as a place full of alien life, or as the last frontier on earth-persist in the cultural imagination and deflect profound engagement with deep-sea microbial worlds. I discuss Frank Schätzing's novel Der Schwarm (2004) as a hopeful exception, proving that a profound engagement with deep-sea worlds does not defy the dynamics of popular fiction. Instead of recycling old storylines, the novel articulates the relevance of deep-sea ecosystems to the Earth system and positions the deep-sea microbe as an important actor in human lifeworlds instead of letting it reside at the fringes of the cultural imagination.

In this introduction, we first paint a panorama of the historiography of microbiology from the end of the nineteenth century until today, spanning from Pasteurian hagiographies, institutional histories, STS-informed analyses to critical research on the emergence of microbiology in an age of global empires. We then suggest three possibilities for historians and anthropologists to rethink the past and present of microbiology: (1) by centralizing the focus of their analyses on geographies and actors outside of the realm of the Pasteur Institute and of the Pasteurians; (2) by studying places of knowledge beyond the laboratory and their interactions with the laboratory; and (3) by researching the past and present of complex ecologies that go beyond sole interactions between humans and pathogenic microbes. These three ways of recentralizing the history of microbiology are not unprecedented nor were they firstly enacted in this collection. On the contrary, this collection builds on a growing stream of innovative research and widens current avenues of research, helping thus to rethink the history of microbiology in a more global and inclusive way.

The aim of this work is to analyze Akkadian medical diagnosis by examining the reasoning involved in the process. The analysis highlights the importance of uncertainty in the timeline of inference. While prognosis pertains to the future, diagnosis concerns something different; it relates to what has already occurred. It is proposed that the analysis would be incomplete without considering the roles of both the past and present within the inferential framework. Ancient medical diagnosis must be understood by accounting for the entire reasoning structure, which is not captured in a single text, for which reason it is necessary to analyze both the diagnostic and therapeutic kind. This work draws on translations of these texts by Assyriologists. Ancient medical science needs to be studied from multiple perspectives, and the logic and philosophy of science can help to gain a better understanding of its practice and methodology.

Two competing approaches, namely the New Mechanism/Mechanistic Philosophy and the "counterfactual + interventionist" (CF + I) approach, have dominated recent debates in philosophy of science. This article argues that the two approaches are underpinned by two logics of experiment. More concretely, there are two types and hence two logics of experiment in biology and medicine: a mechanism-oriented one and a populational one. The former seeks to identify and establish mechanisms or pathways (including entities, activities, and interactions) behind biological phenomena, whereas the latter seeks to establish whether and how much specific factors or variables impact outcomes at the populational level. These two types of experiment operate upon two different logics, and the word "experiment" means quite different things for them. Explicitly differentiating the two logics of experiment yields critical implications for a host of philosophical issues, including whether natural selection is a mechanism and whether the Hodgkin-Huxley model is explanatory.