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  1. Immunity in Light of Spinoza and Canguilhem.Hidetaka Yakura - 2020 - Philosophies 5 (4):38.
    All living organisms are under stress imposed by their surrounding environments. They must adapt to their stressors to live and survive. At the forefront of this adaptation is a defense system called immunity. Immunity, as the most ancient cognitive apparatus with memory function, is present in all living organisms. In previous reports, minimal cognitive function was defined as a “biologized” concept—namely, perception of elements in a milieu, integration of perceived information, reaction according to integrated information, and memory of that experience. (...)
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  • Philosophy of immunology.Bartlomiej Swiatczak & Alfred I. Tauber - 2020 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2020.
    Philosophy of immunology is a subfield of philosophy of biology dealing with ontological and epistemological issues related to the studies of the immune system. While speculative investigations and abstract analyses have always been part of immune theorizing, until recently philosophers have largely ignored immunology. Yet the implications for understanding the philosophical basis of organismal functions framed by immunity offer new perspectives on fundamental questions of biology and medicine. Developed in the context of history of medicine, theoretical biology, and medical anthropology, (...)
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  • Genidentity and Biological Processes.Thomas Pradeu - 2018 - In Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré (eds.), Everything Flows: Towards a Processual Philosophy of Biology. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
    A crucial question for a process view of life is how to identify a process and how to follow it through time. The genidentity view can contribute decisively to this project. It says that the identity through time of an entity X is given by a well-identified series of continuous states of affairs. Genidentity helps address the problem of diachronic identity in the living world. This chapter describes the centrality of the concept of genidentity for David Hull and proposes an (...)
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  • A Mixed Self: The Role of Symbiosis in Development.Thomas Pradeu - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (1):80-88.
    Since the 1950s, the common view of development has been internalist: development is seen as the result of the unfolding of potentialities already present in the egg cell. In this article, I show that this view is incorrect because of the crucial influence of the environment on development. I focus on a fascinating example, that of the role played by symbioses in development, especially bacterial symbioses, a phenomenon found in virtually all organisms (plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates). I claim that we (...)
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  • Plant individuality: a solution to the demographer’s dilemma.Ellen Clarke - 2012 - Biology and Philosophy 27 (3):321-361.
    The problem of plant individuality is something which has vexed botanists throughout the ages, with fashion swinging back and forth from treating plants as communities of individuals (Darwin 1800 ; Braun and Stone 1853 ; Münch 1938 ) to treating them as organisms in their own right, and although the latter view has dominated mainstream thought most recently (Harper 1977 ; Cook 1985 ; Ariew and Lewontin 2004 ), a lively debate conducted mostly in Scandinavian journals proves that the issues (...)
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  • The Problem of Biological Individuality.Ellen Clarke - 2010 - Biological Theory 5 (4):312-325.
    Darwin’s classic ‘Origin of Species’ (Darwin 1859) described forces of selection acting upon individuals, but there remains a great deal of controversy about what exactly the status and definition of a biological individual is. Recently some authors have argued that the individual is dispensable – that an inability to pin it down is not problematic because little rests on it anyway. The aim of this paper is to show that there is a real problem of biological individuality, and an urgent (...)
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  • (1 other version)The pluripotent history of immunology. A review.Neeraja Sankaran - 2012 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (1):37-54.
    The historiography of immunology since 1999 is reviewed, in part as a response to claims by historians such as Thomas Söderqvist the field was still immature at the time. First addressed are the difficulties, past and present, surrounding the disciplinary definition of immunology, which is followed by a commentary on the recent scholarship devoted to the concept of the immune self. The new literature on broad immunological topics is examined and assessed, and specific charges leveled against the paucity of certain (...)
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  • Microchimerism in the Mother(land): Blurring the Borders of Body and Nation.Aryn Martin - 2010 - Body and Society 16 (3):23-50.
    This article traces the ubiquitous geopolitical metaphors used by researchers in the field of pregnancy-related microchimerism. In this research domain, immunologists and medical geneticists locate ‘non-self’ cells in women by marking Y chromosomes in cells derived from their sons. In the course of this research trajectory, experiments have yielded a number of surprises, beginning with the very presence of these cells in women decades after pregnancy. This finding confounded the expectations predicted by classical immunology, which posits the destruction of such (...)
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  • Adaptive immunity or evolutionary adaptation? Transgenerational immune systems at the crossroads.Sophie Juliane Veigl - 2022 - Biology and Philosophy 37 (5):1-21.
    In recent years, immune systems have sparked considerable interest within the philosophy of science. One issue that has received increased attention is whether other phyla besides vertebrates display an adaptive immune system. Particularly the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9-based systems has triggered a discussion about how to classify adaptive immune systems. One question that has not been addressed yet is the transgenerational aspect of the CRISPR-Cas9-based response. If immunity is acquired and inherited, how to distinguish evolutionary from immunological adaptation? To shed light (...)
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  • Organisms as Ecosystems/Ecosystems as Organisms.Minus van Baalen & Philippe Huneman - 2014 - Biological Theory 9 (4):357-360.
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  • Breaking with the self: Can continuity in immunology succeed? [REVIEW]Neeraja Sankaran - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (2):242-246.
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  • (2 other versions)The Boundaries of Development.Thomas Pradeu, Lucie Laplane, Michel Morange, Antonine Nicoglou & Michel Vervoort - 2011 - Biological Theory 6 (1):1 - 3.
    This special issue of Biological Theory is focused on development; it raises the problem of the temporal and spatial boundaries of development. From a temporal point of view, when does development start and stop? From a spatial point of view, what is it exactly that "develops", and is it possible to delineate clearly the developing entity? This issue explores the possible answers to these questions, and thus sheds light on the definition of development itself.
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  • (1 other version)CRISPR-Cas immunity: beyond nonself and defence.Thomas Pradeu & Jean-François Moreau - 2019 - Biology and Philosophy 34 (1):6.
    In this commentary of Koonin’s target paper, we defend an extended view of CRISPR-Cas immunity by arguing that CRISPR-Cas includes, but cannot be reduced to, defence against nonself. CRISPR-Cas systems can target endogenous elements and tolerate exogenous elements. We conclude that the vocabulary of “defence” and “nonself” might be misleading when describing CRISPR-Cas systems.
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  • The Speed of Change: Towards a Discontinuity Theory of Immunity?Thomas Pradeu, Sébastien Jaeger & Eric Vivier - 2013 - Nature Reviews Immunology 13 (10):764–769.
    Immunology — though deeply experimental in everyday practice — is also a theoretical discipline. Recent advances in the understanding of innate immunity, how it is triggered and how it shares features that have previously been uniquely ascribed to the adaptive immune system, can contribute to the refinement of the theoretical framework of immunology. In particular, natural killer cells and macrophages are activated by transient modifications, but adapt to long-lasting modifications that occur in the surrounding tissue environment. This process facilitates the (...)
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  • The Politics of Immunity: Reading Cohen through Canguilhem and New Materialism.Michelle Jamieson - 2016 - Body and Society 22 (4):106-129.
    The issue of what is proper to nature, or life itself, is central to critical accounts of biomedicine and its complex interrelations with social, political and economic forces. These engagements, namely biopolitical accounts of medical practices and ethical-political critiques of biomedical discourse, grapple with the indistinction between the political and biological that biomedicine enacts. Making a significant contribution to both literatures, Ed Cohen’s A Body Worth Defending argues that the emergence of the concept of biological immunity signals the entry of (...)
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  • In defense of the organism: Thomas Pradeu : The limits of the self: immunology and biological identity. Oxford University Press, New York, 2012, ix+302 pp, $65 HB, ISBN: 978-0-19-977528-6.Matthew H. Haber - 2014 - Biology and Philosophy 29 (6):885-895.
    Thomas Pradeu’s The Limits of the Self provides a precise account of biological identity developed from the central concepts of immunology. Yet the central concepts most relevant to this task are themselves deemed inadequate, suffering from ambiguity and imprecision. Pradeu seeks to remedy this by proposing a new guiding theory for immunology, the continuity theory. From this, an account of biological identity is provided in terms of uniqueness and individuality, ultimately leading to a defense of the heterogeneous organism as expressing (...)
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  • Not by structures alone: Can the immune system recognize microbial functions?Gregor P. Greslehner - 2020 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 84 (C):101336.
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  • What is an organism? An immunological answer.Thomas Pradeu - 2010 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 32 (2-3):247-267.
    The question “What is an organism?”, formerly considered as essential in biology, has now been increasingly replaced by a larger question, “What is a biological individual?”. On the grounds that i) individuation is theory-dependent, and ii) physiology does not offer a theory, biologists and philosophers of biology have claimed that it is the theory of evolution by natural selection which tells us what counts as a biological individual. Here I show that one physiological field, immunology, offers a theory, which makes (...)
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  • Microorganisms as scaffolds of host individuality: an eco-immunity account of the holobiont.Lynn Chiu & Gérard Eberl - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):819-837.
    There is currently a great debate about whether the holobiont, i.e. a multicellular host and its residential microorganisms, constitutes a biological individual. We propose that resident microorganisms have a general and important role in the individuality of the host organism, not the holobiont. Drawing upon the Equilibrium Model of Immunity, we argue that microorganisms are scaffolds of immune capacities and processes that determine the constituency and persistence of the host organism. A scaffolding perspective accommodates the contingency and heterogeneity of resident (...)
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  • (1 other version)Immunity and the Emergence of Individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2013 - In Frederic Bouchard & Philippe Huneman (eds.), From Groups to Individuals: Evolution and Emerging Individuality. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. pp. 77.
    Since, it has become clear that individuality is not to be considered as a given, but rather as something which needs to be explained. How has individuality emerged through evolution, and how has it subsequently been maintained? In particular, why is it that multicellular organisms appeared and persisted, despite the obvious interest of each cell of favoring its own replication? Several biologists see the immune system as one of the key components for explaining the maintenance of multicellular organisms’ individuality. Indeed, (...)
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  • Identidad e individualidad como motores en la construcción de la inmunología.Alfonso Arroyo Santos - 2014 - Metatheoria – Revista de Filosofía E Historia de la Ciencia 5:49--63.
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