{"title":"The life sciences and the history of analytic philosophy.","authors":"Andreas Vrahimis","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00622-w","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00622-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Comparative to the commonplace focus onto developments in mathematics and physics, the life sciences appear to have received relatively sparse attention within the early history of analytic philosophy. This paper addresses two related aspects of this phenomenon. On the one hand, it asks: to the extent that the significance of the life sciences was indeed downplayed by early analytic philosophers, why was this the case? An answer to this question may be found in Bertrand Russell's 1914 discussions of the relation between biology and philosophy. Contrary to received views of the history of analytic philosophy, Russell presented his own 'logical atomism' in opposition not only to British Idealism, but also to 'evolutionism'. On the other hand, I will question whether this purported neglect of the life sciences does indeed accurately characterise the history of analytic philosophy. In answering this, I turn first to Susan Stebbing's criticisms of Russell's overlooking of biology, her influence on J.H. Woodger, and her critical discussion of T.H. Huxley's and C.H. Waddington's application of evolutionary views to philosophical questions. I then discuss the case of Moritz Schlick, whose evolutionist philosophy has been overlooked within recent debates concerning Logical Empiricism's relation to the philosophy of biology.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"27"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141861820","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Louis-Patrick Haraoui, Anthony Rizk, Hannah Landecker
{"title":"States of Resistance: nosocomial and environmental approaches to antimicrobial resistance in Lebanon.","authors":"Louis-Patrick Haraoui, Anthony Rizk, Hannah Landecker","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00624-8","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00624-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Drawing on institutional historical records, interviews and student theses, this article charts the intersection of hospital acquired illness, the emergence of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), environments of armed conflict, and larger questions of social governance in the specific case of the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC) in Lebanon. Taking a methodological cue from approaches in contemporary scientific work that understand non-clinical settings as a fundamental aspect of the history and development of AMR, we treat the hospital as not just nested in a set of social and environmental contexts, but frequently housing within itself elements of social and environmental history. AMR in Lebanon differs in important ways from the settings in which global protocols for infection control or rubrics for risk factor identification for resistant nosocomial outbreaks were originally generated. While such differences are all too often depicted as failures of low and middle-income countries (LMIC) to maintain universal standards, the historical question before us is quite the reverse: how have the putatively universal rubrics of AMR and hospital infection control failed to take account of social and environmental conditions that clearly matter deeply in the evolution and spread of resistance? Focusing on conditions of war as an organized chaos in which social, environmental and clinical factors shift dramatically, on the social and political topography of patient transfer, and on a missing \"meso\" level of AMR surveillance between the local and global settings, we show how a multisectoral One Health approach to AMR could be enriched by an answering multisectoral methodology in history, particularly one that unsettles a canonical focus on the story of AMR in the Euro-American context.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"28"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11294430/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141876783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Malin Ah-King, The female turn. How evolutionary science shifted perceptions about females, Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan, 2022.","authors":"Jacopo Ambrosj","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00621-x","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00621-x","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"26"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768259","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sara Green, Animal models of human disease, 2024, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.","authors":"Héloïse Athéa","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00626-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00626-6","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"25"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"William Bechtel & Linus Ta-Lun Huang, Philosophy of neuroscience, 2022. Cambridge University Press.","authors":"Matthew Perkins-McVey","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00625-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00625-7","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"23"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bernd Rosslenbroich, Properties of life. Toward a theory of organismic biology. Vienna series in theoretical biology, 2023, The MIT Press, 326 Pages, ISBN 9780262546201 (Paperback).","authors":"Christoph J Hueck","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00623-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00623-9","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"24"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-07-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141768258","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Narratives in exposomics: A reversed heuristic determinism?","authors":"Francesca Merlin, Élodie Giroux","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00620-y","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00620-y","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Since the completion of the Human Genome Project (HGP), biomedical sciences have moved away from a gene-centred view and towards a multi-factorial one in which environment, broadly speaking, plays a central role in the determination of human health and disease. Environmental exposures have been shown to be highly prevalent in disease causation. They are considered as complementary to genetic factors in the etiology of diseases, hence the introduction of the concept of the \"exposome\" as encompassing the totality of human environmental exposures, from conception onwards (Wild in Cancer Epidemiol Biomark Prev 14:1847-1850, 2005), and the launch of the Human Exposome Project (HEP) which aims to complement the HGP. At first sight, and seen as complementary to the genome, the exposome could thus appear as contributing to the rise of novel postgenomic deterministic narratives which place the environment at their core. Is this really the case? If so, what sort of determinism is at work in exposomics research? Is it a case of environmental determinism, and if so, in what sense? Or is it a new sort of deterministic view? In this paper, we first show that causal narratives in exposomics are still very similar to gene-centred deterministic narratives. They correspond to a form of Laplacian determinism and, above all, to what Claude Bernard called the \"determinism of a phenomenon\". Second, we introduce the notion of \"reversed heuristic determinism\" to characterize the specific deterministic narratives present in exposomics. Indeed, the accepted sorts of external environmental exposures conceived as being at the origins of diseases are determined, methodologically speaking, by their identifiable internal and biological markers. We conclude by highlighting the most relevant implications of the presence of this heuristic determinism in exposomics research.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 3","pages":"22"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-06-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141452320","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On the relationship between scientific theory and ontology in everything flows.","authors":"Markus Maier","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00618-6","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00618-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In their anthology Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology, Daniel J. Nicholson and John Dupré argue that modern theories of biology imply that the fundamental structure of reality is processual at its core. In the present work, I first examine the implicit and explicit metaphysical presuppositions the editors make in order to allow for such an inference from scientific theory to ontology. After showing the difficulties of a naïve transfer of theoretical entities to fundamental ontology, I argue that the editors can nevertheless extend their claims beyond the mere articulation of different domain ontologies. This leads to the idea of a scientifically informed induction base for an ontology of processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 2","pages":"21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141176928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Jeannie N. Shinozuka, Biotic borders: Transpacific plant and insect migration and the rise of anti-Asian racism in America, 1890-1950, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2022.","authors":"Ashanti Shih","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00619-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s40656-024-00619-5","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 2","pages":"20"},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141089224","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mario Ageno and the status of biophysics.","authors":"Daniele Cozzoli","doi":"10.1007/s40656-024-00617-7","DOIUrl":"10.1007/s40656-024-00617-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This essay focuses on Mario Ageno (1915-1992), initially director of the physics laboratory of the Italian National Institute of Health and later professor of biophysics at Sapienza University of Rome. A physicist by training, Ageno became interested in explaining the special characteristics of living organisms origin of life by means of quantum mechanics after reading a book by Schrödinger, who argued that quantum mechanics was consistent with life but that new physical principles must be found. Ageno turned Schrödinger's view into a long-term research project. He aimed to translate Schrödinger's ideas into an experimental programme by building a physical model for at least a very simple living organism. The model should explain the transition from the non-living to the living. His research, however, did not lead to the expected results, and in the 1980s and the 1990s he focused on its epistemological aspect, thinking over the tension between the lawlike structure of physics and the historical nature of biology. His reflections led him to focus on the nature of the theory of evolution and its broader scientific meaning.</p>","PeriodicalId":56308,"journal":{"name":"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences","volume":"46 2","pages":"19"},"PeriodicalIF":1.6,"publicationDate":"2024-05-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11126424/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141089225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}