In the last decade, the notion that new possibilities appear over time in biological phenomena has received renewed and growing attention. Kauffman approaches it as the adjacent possible, Sarti and Citti as heterogenesis, and Longo and Montévil as symmetry change and specific objects. Accordingly, there is a growing understanding that this notion is a significant shift and challenge in the way to do science. However, there has yet to be a systematic effort to bring together the different perspectives on this question in biology and in other fields confronted with it. In this conference, we intend to create bridges between the different perspectives that have been developed, mostly independently, on the question of changing possibility spaces in biology.
10h30-12h30, Salle des Actes, École Normale Supérieure
The other beginning of philosophy arrives through a rethinking of the very meaning of beginning. The beginning in this case involves those philosophical works and intuitions from out of which one begins. The political and ethical questions arose from within and from outside of the philosophical archives of the past that are also demanding a new sense for "the history of philosophy. The deepest pre-conceptions of metaphysics which informs the sciences are being evaluated from out of the stasis in which several of the scientific pursuits find themselves today. For these reasons, the meaning of beginning is nothing simple.
In this colloquium, we celebrate the 75th birthdays of Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto. We have chosen to show their distinct trajectories and then how they intersect while working on the foundations of theoretical knowledge with a biology focus. In this respect, both Giuseppe Longo and Ana Soto maintain a close relationship with philosophy and philosophers. At the same time, both are also involved in “the life of the polis”, this is, addressing the repercussions of science in society and the environment, both as scientists and intellectuals.
The multiple crises of philosophy (conceptual, institutional, vocational, political, economic) which have constituted a situation of more than crisis—a criticalisation—from which philosophy will not be able to recover into anything resembling what it was in the past. However, these moments of crises also offer a chance to question what were properly philosophical evils and initiate an inventive era of philosophy which will be able to comprehend a new relation with other disciplines including the sciences, psychoanalysis, politics, and technology. The analytic of the stasis of philosophy began with the tradition of deconstruction through Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Bernard Stiegler. Today we already have glimpses of philosophy in anastasis, or the experience of philosophy coming over stasis. The four speakers will outline and discuss the other beginning of philosophy.
Private interests sometimes indulge in disrupting scientific knowledge. The study of these strategies with human sciences’ methods is called agnotology. In today’s event, we will discuss this matter from the perspective of scientists who were directly confronted with this kind of practice. We will also explore the notion that increasing theoretical accuracy in fields such as biology, especially molecular biology, would increase the resilience of the scientific endeavor when facing such disruptions.
Since the Wingspread conference in 1991, endocrine disruptors are an active field of research and concern for public health. This workshop aims to discuss the notion of disruption in the context of endocrine disruptors.
We are a group of mathematicians who denounce a mathematization of the world oriented towards purely quantitative analyses and reductionism, rather than invention and construction of understanding. The prevailing use of mathematics as a search for “optimal paths” in economy, biology and general human activities supposes a pre-given universe of possibilities and is suitable for control more than for knowledge construction and a common action. Sometimes, researchers even claim that “computer programs” run organisms’ development and animal or human behavior. We are instead interested in the historical emergence of meaning in changing spaces of possibilities as well as in the production of sense in science and in the personal activity of the researcher. Our current work focuses on historicity, organicity and contextuality of life; on the role of interpretation and meaning in the process of vision; on the importance of interpretation in the applications of mathematics and of a committed analysis of future projections in areas such as finance and ecology. In 2017, we proposed the creation of the association Girolamo Cardano (1501- 1576: inventor of imaginary numbers, first thinker of the transformation of the living in time) that readers are invited to join: http://cardano.visions- des-sciences.eu
Universidad del Pais Vasco (EHU/UPV) Campus de Guipuzkoa
The workshop will discuss the notion of biological organization from a systemic- perspective. In particular it will focus on its intrinsic hierarchical dimension, and on the role organization plays in the understanding of the transition from pre-biotic to minimal living systems and of more complex forms of biological, cognitive and ecological systems.
