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  1. Synthetic biology as a technoscience: The case of minimal genomes and essential genes.Massimiliano Simons - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85:127-136.
    This article examines how minimal genome research mobilizes philosophical concepts such as minimality and essentiality. Following a historical approach the article aims to uncover what function this terminology plays and which problems are raised by them. Specifically, four historical moments are examined, linked to the work of Harold J. Morowitz, Mitsuhiro Itaya, Eugene Koonin and Arcady Mushegian, and J. Craig Venter. What this survey shows is a historical shift away from historical questions about life or descriptive questions about specific organisms (...)
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  • Playing God: Symbolic Arguments Against Technology.Massimiliano Simons - 2022 - NanoEthics 16 (2):151-165.
    In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that ground our value judgments in the (...)
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  • Knowing Use: An Analysis of Epistemic Functionality in Synthetic Biology.Pablo Schyfter - 2021 - Social Epistemology 35 (5):475-489.
    Many things that humans put together humans also put to use. Among these are certain forms of knowledge. Science studies and the sociology of knowledge have contributed great insight into scientist...
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  • Exploring biological possibility through synthetic biology.Tero Ijäs & Rami Koskinen - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (2):1-17.
    This paper analyzes the notion of possibility in biology and demonstrates how synthetic biology can provide understanding on the modal dimension of biological systems. Among modal concepts, biological possibility has received surprisingly little explicit treatment in the philosophy of science. The aim of this paper is to argue for the importance of the notion of biological possibility by showing how it provides both a philosophically and biologically fruitful category as well as introducing a new practically grounded way for its assessment. (...)
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  • BrisSynBio Art-Science Dossier.Maria Fannin, Katy Connor, David Roden & Darian Meacham - 2020 - NanoEthics 14 (1):27-41.
    Finding avenues for collaboration and engagement between the arts and the sciences (natural and social) was a central theme of investigation for the Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and Public Engagement programme at BrisSynBio, a BBSRC/EPSRC Synthetic Biology Research Centre that is now part of the Bristol BioDesign Institute at University of Bristol (UK). The reflections and experiments that appear in this dossier are a sample of these investigations and are contributed by Maria Fannin, Katy Connor and David Roden. Darian (...)
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  • De nieuwe poortwachters van de waarheid.Massimiliano Simons - 2020 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 1 (82):33-56.
    The central claim of this article is that post-truth requires a political and socio-economical perspective, rather than a moral or epistemological one. The article consists of two parts. The first part offers a critical examination of the dominant analyses of post-truth in terms of shifting standards of the origin and the evaluation of facts. Moreover, the claim that postmodernism is the cause of post-truth is examined and refuted. In the second part an alternative perspective is developed, centring around the notion (...)
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  • Dreaming of a Universal Biology: Synthetic Biology and the Origins of Life.Massimiliano Simons - 2021 - Hyle: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 27:91-116.
    Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or redesign existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology’s specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a new regime of articulation, i.e. a new way of articulating the (...)
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