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The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor?

Cambridge University Press (1994)

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  1. 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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  • 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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  • On the definition of a criterion of immunogenicity.Thomas Pradeu & Edgardo Carosella - 2006 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103 (47):17858--17861.
    The main objective of immunology is to establish why and when an immune response occurs, that is, to determine a criterion of immunogenicity. According to the consensus view, the proper criterion of immunogenicity lies in the discrimination between self and nonself. Here we challenge this consensus by suggesting a simpler and more comprehensive criterion, the criterion of continuity. Moreover, we show that this criterion may be considered as an interpretation of the immune 'self'. We conclude that immunologists can continue to (...)
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  • On biological identity.Giovanni Boniolo & Massimiliano Carrara - 2004 - Biology and Philosophy 19 (3):443-457.
    In our paper, we propose a relativisticand metaphysically neutral identity criterionfor biological entities. We start from thecriterion of genidentity proposed by K. Lewinand H. Reichenbach. Then we enrich it to renderit more philosophical powerful and so capableof dealing with the real transformations thatoccur in the extremely variegated biologicalworld.
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  • On the Genesis, Continuum, and the Lowest Bound of Selves.Reshma Joy - 2024 - JOLMA - The Journal for the Philosophy of Language, Mind, and the Arts 4 (2):243-270.
    In the history of philosophy, the concept of self has been perennially elusive. The philosophical quest to understand the self is rife with phenomenological and metaphysical analyses, often overlooking other kinds of selves present in the biological realm. To systematically explore this question of non-human selves, I categorize the literature on philosophical and biological notions of self into the biogenic, the zoogenic, and the anthropogenic approaches to self. This article attempts to chart the genesis, the continuum, and the lowest bound (...)
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  • The holobiont self: understanding immunity in context.Tamar Schneider - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (3):1-23.
    Both concepts of the holobiont and the immune system are at the heart of an ongoing scientific and philosophical examination concerning questions of the organism’s individuality and identity as well as the relations between organisms and their environment. Examining the holobiont, the question of boundaries and individuality is challenging because it is both an assemblage of organisms with physiological cohesive aspects. I discuss the concept of immunity and the immune system function from the holobiont perspective. Because of the host-microbial close (...)
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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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  • 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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  • Were You a Part of Your Mother?Elselijn Kingma - 2019 - Mind 128 (511):609-646.
    Is the mammalian embryo/fetus a part of the organism that gestates it? According to the containment view, the fetus is not a part of, but merely contained within or surrounded by, the gestating organism. According to the parthood view, the fetus is a part of the gestating organism. This paper proceeds in two stages. First, I argue that the containment view is the received view; that it is generally assumed without good reason; and that it needs substantial support if it (...)
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  • 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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  • Persons Versus Brains: Biological Intelligence in Human Organisms.E. Steinhart - 2001 - Biology and Philosophy 16 (1):3-27.
    I go deep into the biology of the human organism to argue that the psychological features and functions of persons are realized by cellular and molecular parallel distributed processing networks dispersed throughout the whole body. Persons supervene on the computational processes of nervous, endocrine, immune, and genetic networks. Persons do not go with brains.
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  • Organisms or biological individuals? Combining physiological and evolutionary individuality.Thomas Pradeu - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):797-817.
    The definition of biological individuality is one of the most discussed topics in philosophy of biology, but current debate has focused almost exclusively on evolution-based accounts. Moreover, several participants in this debate consider the notions of a biological individual and an organism as equivalent. In this paper, I show that the debates would be considerably enriched and clarified if philosophers took into account two elements. First, physiological fields are crucial for the understanding of biological individuality. Second, the category of biological (...)
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  • In search of organizing principles of the immune system: William E. Paul: Immunity. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2015, 289pp, $29.95. [REVIEW]Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2016 - Metascience 25 (2):201-204.
    Immunity by William Paul is an overview of fundamental principles of immunology and their experimental basis. The book includes not only well- established facts about the immune system but also recent findings (the role of Th17 cells, regulatory T cells, inflammasomes, etc.), which are skillfully incorporated into the framework of immunological understanding. The presentation is clear and emotionally charged, which makes the reading of Immunity enjoyable. Despite the original intentions, though, the book may appear too challenging for a lay reader (...)
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  • (1 other version)The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Vol 75, No 3. [REVIEW] Anon - 1998 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 49 (1):195-198.
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  • The reflexive project: reconstructing the moral agent.Alfred I. Tauber - 2005 - History of the Human Sciences 18 (4):49-75.
    In the 17th century, ‘reflexivity’ was coined as a new term for introspection and self-awareness. It thus was poised to serve the instrumental function of combating skepticism by asserting a knowing self. In this Cartesian paradigm, introspection ends in an entity of self-identity. An alternate interpretation recognized how an infinite regress of reflexivity would render ‘the self’ elusive, if not unknowable. Reflexivity in this latter mode was rediscovered by post-Kantian philosophers, most notably Hegel, who defined the self in its self-reflective (...)
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  • Stems and Standards: Social Interaction in the Search for Blood Stem Cells.Melinda Bonnie Fagan - 2010 - Journal of the History of Biology 43 (1):67 - 109.
    This essay examines the role of social interactions in the search for blood stem cells, in a recent episode of biomedical research. Linked to mid-20th century cell biology, genetics and radiation research, the search for blood stem cells coalesced in the 1960s and took a developmental turn in the late 1980s, with significant ramifications for immunology, stem cell and cancer biology. Like much contemporary biomedical research, this line of inquiry exhibits a complex social structure and includes several prominent scientific successes, (...)
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  • Idealization and the structure of theories in biololgy.Alfonso Arroyo-Santos & Xavier De Donato-Rodríguez - 2008
    In this paper we present a new framework of idealization in biology. We characterize idealizations as a network of counterfactual conditionals that can exhibit different degrees of contingency. We use the idea of possible worlds to say that, in departing more or less from the actual world, idealizations can serve numerous epistemic, methodological or heuristic purposes within scientific research. We defend that, in part, it is this structure what helps explain why idealizations, despite being deformations of reality, are so successful (...)
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  • Rethinking individuality: the dialectics of the holobiont.Scott F. Gilbert & Alfred I. Tauber - 2016 - Biology and Philosophy 31 (6):839-853.
    Given immunity’s general role in the organism’s economy—both in terms of its internal environment as well as mediating its external relations—immune theory has expanded its traditional formulation of preserving individual autonomy to one that includes accounting for nutritional processes and symbiotic relationships that require immune tolerance. When such a full ecological alignment is adopted, the immune system becomes the mediator of both defensive and assimilative environmental intercourse, where a balance of immune rejection and tolerance governs the complex interactions of the (...)
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  • Singularity and Uniqueness: Why Is Our Immune System Subject to Psychological and Cognitive Traits?Amihud Gilead - unknown
    Immunologists use psychological and cognitive terms to describe and explain the behavior of our immune system. Do they use them metaphorically or literally? In this paper I show that on the grounds of some psychophysical assumptions, the uniqueness of each person as an individual organism necessarily corresponds to the singularity of each person as a psychological subject. On the basis of these assumptions, immunologists, irrespective of their various conceptual frames, are entitled to ascribe psychological and cognitive traits to our immune (...)
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  • Me, my self, and the multitude: Microbiopolitics of the human microbiome.Penelope Ironstone - 2019 - European Journal of Social Theory 22 (3):325-341.
    The human microbiome has become one of the dominant biomedical frameworks of the contemporary moment that may be understood to be post-Pasteurian. The recognitions the human microbiome opens up for thinking about the biological self and the individual have ontological and epistemological ramifications for considering what and who the human being is. As this article illustrates, the microbiopolitics of the human microbiome challenges the immunitarian Pasteurian model in which the organismic self shores itself up and defends itself against a microbial (...)
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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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  • Fetal–Maternal Intra-action: Politics of New Placental Biologies.Rebecca Scott Yoshizawa - 2016 - Body and Society 22 (4):79-105.
    Extensively employed in reproductive science, the term fetal–maternal interface describes how maternal and fetal tissues interact in the womb to produce the transient placenta, purporting a theory of pregnancy where ‘mother’, ‘fetus’, and ‘placenta’ are already-separate entities. However, considerable scientific evidence supports a different theory, which is also elaborated in feminist and new materialist literatures. Informed by interviews with placenta scientists as well as secondary sources on placental immunology and the developmental origins of health and disease, I explore evidence not (...)
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  • Conceptual shifts in immunology: Comments on the 'two-way paradigm'. [REVIEW]Alfred I. Tauber - 1998 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 19 (5):457-473.
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  • How many ways can you die? Multiple biological deaths as a consequence of the multiple concepts of an organism.Piotr Grzegorz Nowak & Adrian Stencel - 2022 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 43 (2):127-154.
    According to the mainstream position in the bioethical definition of death debate, death is to be equated with the cessation of an organism. Given such a perspective, some bioethicists uphold the position that brain-dead patients are dead, while others claim that they are alive. Regardless of the specific opinion on the status of brain-dead patients, the mere bioethical concept of death, according to many bioethicists, has the merit of being unanimous and univocal, as well as grounded in biology. In the (...)
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  • Thirty years of Biology & Philosophy: philosophy of which biology?Thomas Pradeu - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (2):149-167.
    Which domains of biology do philosophers of biology primarily study? The fact that philosophy of biology has been dominated by an interest for evolutionary biology is widely admitted, but it has not been strictly demonstrated. Here I analyse the topics of all the papers published in Biology & Philosophy, just as the journal celebrates its thirtieth anniversary. I then compare the distribution of biological topics in Biology & Philosophy with that of the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of (...)
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  • Od immunologicznego „ja” do działania moralnego. Komentarze.Alfred I. Tauber - 2012 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (1).
    [Przekład] Autor komentuje zmiany w filozofii immunologii, które zaszły od czasu opublikowania jego książki The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor?, a także istniejące w tej dziedzinie zagrożenia, nieporozumienia i oczekiwania. Wreszcie – przedstawia w tym kontekście własne ujęcie działania moralnego, odnosząc się do własnych prac.
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  • Immune balance: The development of the idea and its applications.Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2014 - Journal of the History of Biology 47 (3):411-442.
    It has long been taken for granted that the immune system’s capacity to protect an individual from infection and disease depends on the power of the system to distinguish between self and nonself. However, accumulating data have undermined this fundamental concept. Evidence against the self/nonself discrimination model left researchers in need of a new overarching framework able to capture the immune system’s reactivity. Here, I highlight that along with the self/nonself model, another powerful representation of the immune system’s reactivity has (...)
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  • Biological Boundaries and the Vertebrate Immune System.Julio R. Tuma - 2009 - Biological Theory 4 (3):287-293.
    Biological boundaries are important because of what they reveal about the evolution of a lineage, the relationship between organisms of different lineages, the structure and function of particular subsystems of the organism, the interconnection between an organism and its environment, and a myriad of other important issues related to individuality, development, and evolution. Since there is no single unifying theory for all biological sciences, there are various possible theoretical characterizations of what counts as a biological boundary. Theoretical specificity is crucial (...)
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  • Current Issues in the Philosophy of Biology.Marjorie Grene - 1997 - Perspectives on Science 5 (2):255-281.
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  • Ja immunologiczne: tworzenie znaczenia in vivo.Yair Neuman - 2012 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (1).
    [Przekład] Ja immunologiczne jest naszym zreifikowanym opisem procesów, dzięki którym układ odpornościowy utrzymuje wyodrębnioną tożsamość organizmu i siebie samego. Jest to proces interpretacyjny, i żeby badać go w sposób naukowo konstruktywny, powinniśmy połączyć długoletnią hermeneutyczną tradycję pytania o naturę interpretacji ze współczesnym rozumieniem układu odpornościowego, pojawiającymi się technologiami badawczymi oraz zaawansowanymi narzędziami obliczeniowymi analizującymi dane sensoryczne.
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  • System odpornościowy, ja immunologiczne. Wprowadzenie.Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2012 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (1).
    [Przekład] Pogląd głoszący, że układ odpornościowy rozróżnia to, co swoje, od tego, co obce, był jednym z centralnych założeń immunologii w drugiej połowie XX wieku. Pogląd ten miał wpływ na projekty eksperymentalne i interpretowanie danych. Jednakże w obliczu nowych dowodów empirycznych konieczny jest w immunologii nowy aparat konceptualny.
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  • Individuation and the Organization in Complex Living Ecosystem: Recursive Integration and Self-assertion by Holon-Lymphocytes.Véronique Thomas-Vaslin - 2019 - Acta Biotheoretica 68 (1):171-199.
    Individuation and organization in complex living multi-level ecosystem occurs as dynamical processes from early ontogeny. The notion of living “holon” displaying dynamic self-assertion and integration is used here to explain the ecosystems dynamic processes. The update of the living holon state according to the continuous change of the dynamic system allows for its viability. This is interpreted as adaptation, selection and organization by the human that observes the system a posteriori from its level. Our model concerns the complex dynamics of (...)
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  • Ciało warte obrony. Wyjaśnienie kilku pojęć: rozważania wstępne.Ed Cohen - 2012 - Avant: Trends in Interdisciplinary Studies 3 (1).
    [Przekład] Tekst niniejszy jest wprowadzeniem do książki Eda Cohena A Body Worth Defending: Immunity, Biopolitics and the Apotheosis of the Modern Body. Autor bada, w jaki sposób immunologia wpływa na postrzeganie tak ciała ludzkiego, jak i bytów politycznych, ukazując współczesne konceptualizacje tych zjawisk jako wzajemnie od siebie zależne. Zastosowane ujęcie historyczne pozwala na prześledzenie historii metafory odporności w polityce i medycynie.
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  • Virus is a Signal for the Host Cell.Jordi Gómez, Ascensión Ariza-Mateos & Isabel Cacho - 2015 - Biosemiotics 8 (3):483-491.
    Currently, the concept of the cell as a society or an ecosystem of molecular elements is gaining increasing acceptance. The basic idea arose in the 19th century, from the surmise that there is not just a single unit underlying an individual’s appearance, but a plurality of entities with both collaborative and conflicting relationships. The following hypothesis is based around this model. The incompatible activities taking place between different original elements, which were subsumed into the first cell and could not be (...)
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  • Towards a hermeneutic of technomedical objects.Kjetil Rommetveit - 2008 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 29 (2):103-120.
    In this article I consider some central aspects of the naturalist philosophy of science and science and technology studies in dealing with the contested status of technoscience in medicine. Focusing on the concepts of realism and representation, I argue that theories of science-as-practice in naturalist philosophy of science should expand their scope so as to reflect more thoroughly on the social and political context of technoscience. I develop a hermeneutic of technomedical objects in order to highlight the internal connectedness between (...)
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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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  • Philosophy as Self-Knowledge.Alfred I. Tauber - 2014 - Philosophia 42 (1):1-23.
    An autobiographical account is offered of how the medical study of self (immunology) became a chapter in the philosophical study of human agency (from Nietzsche and Thoreau to Freud by way of Wittgenstein). Whether viewed scientifically or philosophically, several themes converge on the intractable instability of any notion of selfhood—epistemological or moral. How this problematic motivated an extended analysis of selfhood refracts the psychology of the author and his pursuit of philosophy as self‐knowledge.
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  • On the Genesis of the Idiotypic Network Theory.Andrea Civello - 2013 - Journal of the History of Biology 46 (1):125-158.
    The idiotypic network theory (INT) was conceived by the Danish immunologist Niels Kaj Jerne in 1973/1974. It proposes an overall view of the immune system as a network of lymphocytes and antibodies. The paper tries to offer a reconstruction of the genesis of the theory, now generally discarded and of mostly historical interest, first of all, by taking into account the context in which Jerne’s theoretical proposal was advanced. It is argued the theory challenged, in a sense, the supremacy of (...)
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  • Beware of mereologists bearing gifts: prolegomena to a medical metaphysics.George Khushf - 2013 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 34 (5):385-408.
    This essay considers implications of formal mereologies and ontologies for medical metaphysics. Edward Fried’s extensional mereological account of the human body is taken as representative of a prominent strand in analytic metaphysics that has close affinities with medical positivism. I show why such accounts fail. First, I consider how Fried attempts to make sense of the medical case of Barney Clark, the first recipient of an artificial heart, and show that his analytic metaphysical categories do not have the right kind (...)
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  • The biological function paradigm applied to the immunological self-non-self discrimination: Critique of Tauber's phenomenological analysis. [REVIEW]Wilfried Allaerts - 1999 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 30 (1):155-171.
    Biological self reference idioms in brain-centered or nervous-system-centered self determination of the consious Self reveal an interesting contrast with biological self-determination by immunological self/non-self discrimination. This contrast is both biological and epistemological. In contrast to the consciousness conscious of itself, the immunological self-determination imposes a protective mechanism against self-recognition (Coutinho et al. 1984), which adds to a largely unconscious achievement of the biological Self (Popper 1977; Medawar 1959). The latter viewpoint is in contrast with the immunological Self-determination as an essentially (...)
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