The Qbio initiative at Institut Pasteur is organising a two-day symposium in Paris on December 12th and 13th 2022 which will cover the interplay between mechanics, evolution, morphogenesis and development. This symposium is meant to be an open platform for discussion between physicists, mathematicians and biologists on relevant biological questions, and to foster interactions between topics/systems which normally have few occasions to interact.
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.
This webinar will be our eleventh meeting within the series of The Alphabet of Complexity webinars. The letter K (as in “kaleidoscope”) will guide us through the main questions of the day: What are the paradigms we live by? What are the implications of research which is genome-centred and how to compare it with the research based on the organism-oriented scientific paradigm? The lectures of three key speakers (Giuseppe Longo, Angelika Hilbeck, Maël Montévil) will be followed by a discussion on how these specific paradigms can inform our actions for the purity of seeds and against GMOs.
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.
Science in the Age of Experience is a reference event for science leaders dedicated to improving lives and accelerating progress towards a more sustainable future.
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
Disruptions are described in both the cases of biological organizations and human health int he scientific literature, but without a precise conceptualization of this notion yet. We have argued that disruptions are the loss of past novelties that contribute to an organization (first order disruptions) or of the ability to generate such novelties (second order disruptions). We focus on a specific case of disruption, the disruption of babies and toddler cognitive and psychologicological developpement by digital media, and the response that was developped with Bernard Stiegler and experimented in Saint-Denis (France), namely contributive research where care puts knowledge at the forefront.
Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, New Delhi, India
Technology and sciences, notably biology, have entered a stasis whereby the nature of the answers provided are remarkably unchanging. For example, most of biological technoscientific research aims to fix problem by finding a molecule that would interact with an intended target. We argue that this stasis is the result of a decline in theoretical work, and notably a weak relationship with philosophy. Then theoretical shortcomings and contradiction are no longer overcome by renewed perspectives, instead outdated frameworks remain undead leading to inconsistent discourses. To overcome this stasis, we propose to introduce a bastardized epistemology, both in biology and technology, that would articulate both systemic and historical reasoning.
Seminar of the History, Philosophy and Biology Teaching Lab
History, Philosophy and Biology Teaching Lab, Universidade Federal da Bahia
Scholars used Aristotelian reasoning in combination with theology to understand living beings, leading to natural theology, where god was the guarantee of biological norms. Transformism, notably Darwin, provided an alternative to this view; however, this alternative had to be acknowledged by scientists when the model of science was classical mechanics. It followed that thinking about biological objects remained similar to physics thinking, where norms are laws, or at least invariants and symmetries. The recurring analogies with technological objects, recently computers, as viewed by engineers (and not users or anthropology) also contributed to this theoretical and epistemological bias and confusion. On the opposite, we can think about biological objects differently, on renewed theoretical bases, by starting from theoretical principles that are sound in this field. Then, instead of fast analogies, numerous new questions, methods, and reasoning have to be fleshed out.
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.
The concept of ‘contributive research’ was introduced by Bernard Stiegler for the multiple, bifurcating ways communities of care are created and cultivated through the production of knowledge, as opposed to the consumption of information. From this perspective, participation in a community constitutes a transformative experience of trans-individuation, oriented toward the re-appropriation of technological artefacts as an ethico-political response to the global challenges of the Anthropocene. The concept shares many qualities with other strands of interventionist research such as collaborative, dialogical, action, practice and participatory research. In this virtual salon we intend to investigate the relevance of the ‘contributive research’ approach for the field of theoretical psychology, suggesting an open, experimental and hermeneutic process of trans-individuation where communities are built through the reflection on and discussion of scientific, aesthetic and other textual representations. According to this approach, and following Stiegler’s theory of grammatization, texts are technological artefacts which constitute communities by rendering knowledge technically reproducible and simultaneously subject to differentiation and bifurcation. We do not aim to present cases of the ‘application’ of contributive research as a ‘method’. Rather, we conceptualize 4 cases of the interaction of emergent communal care and agency with research and with other forms of representation.
Biology is a science where, evolution possibly put aside, theories are not significantly developed. Nevertheless, at the theoretical and epistemological level, we argue that biology raises major challenges, notably in contrast with the theorizations of physics. In a nutshell, biology has to accommodate objects endowed with historicity: the ways they live are the result of their history, and they continue to generate history by the appearance of functional novelties. At the same time, they have organizations that require systemic understanding. We will introduce some aspects of this theoretical situation and show how it leads to peculiar vulnerabilities of the living that have acute manifestations in the Anthropocene. In that regard, we will discuss disruptions in biology, from ecosystems to early cognitive and psychological human development, and some responses to them.
Gradska biblioteka/Belgrade City Library, Rimska sala/Roman hall, Knez Mihailova 56, Belgrade
In biology, despite the elements exposed in the previous session, the epistemology of physics remains pervasive. For example, mathematical models are typically designed and analyzed like in physics, from population genetic to biological morphogenesis. Then, we should rethink theorizing in biology to accommodate historicity but still leverage some methods coming from physics. Articulating both epistemologies opens a wealth of challenges and methodological opportunities. To illustrate this, we discuss what is often informally called disruption in biology and is a significant part of both biodiversity loss and public health issues. These disruptions require both the insight of historical and systemic thinking.
Gradska biblioteka/Belgrade City Library, Rimska sala/Roman hall, Knez Mihailova 56, Belgrade
In biology, the question of origins often refers to the origin of life; however, it is far broader and, in a sense, has far more pervasive ramifications. All organisms carry differences and can be the beginning of a new lineage. This perspective is central to the phylogenetic classification of living beings. In this course, we will discuss this approach from an epistemological angle. We will also show that, beyond the specific method, its epistemology permeates biology, for example, the reporting of experiments. Overall, we will discuss how the historical nature of biological objects can be used as a lever to define them theoretically and how this approach differs profoundly from the ones in physics.
