Results for 'gut bacteria'

151 found
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  1. Digestion, Habit, and Being at Home: Hegel and the Gut as Ambiguous Other.Jane Dryden - 2016 - PhaenEx 11 (2):1-22.
    Recent work in the philosophy of biology argues that we must rethink the biological individual beyond the boundary of the species, given that a key part of our essential functioning is carried out by the bacteria in our intestines in a way that challenges any strictly genetic account of what is involved for the biological human. The gut is a kind of ambiguous other within our understanding of ourselves, particularly when we also consider the status of gastro-intestinal disorders. Hegel (...)
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  2. Enactive Pragmatism and Ecological Psychology.Matthew Crippen - 2020 - Frontiers in Psychology 11:538644.
    A widely cited roadblock to bridging ecological psychology and enactivism is that the former identifies with realism and the latter identifies with constructivism, which critics charge is subjectivist. A pragmatic reading, however, suggests non-mental forms of constructivism that simultaneously fit core tenets of enactivism and ecological realism. After advancing a pragmatic version of enactive constructivism that does not obviate realism, I reinforce the position with an empirical illustration: Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold), a communal unicellular organism that leaves slime trails (...)
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  3. Bacteria, sex, and systematics.L. R. Franklin - 2007 - Philosophy of Science 74 (1):69-95.
    Philosophical discussions of species have focused on multicellular, sexual animals and have often neglected to consider unicellular organisms like bacteria. This article begins to fill this gap by considering what species concepts, if any, apply neatly to the bacterial world. First, I argue that the biological species concept cannot be applied to bacteria because of the variable rates of genetic transfer between populations, depending in part on which gene type is prioritized. Second, I present a critique of phylogenetic (...)
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  4. Bacteria are small but not stupid: cognition, natural genetic engineering and socio-bacteriology.J. A. Shapiro - 2007 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (4):807-819.
    Forty years’ experience as a bacterial geneticist has taught me that bacteria possess many cognitive, computational and evolutionary capabilities unimaginable in the first six decades of the twentieth century. Analysis of cellular processes such as metabolism, regulation of protein synthesis, and DNA repair established that bacteria continually monitor their external and internal environments and compute functional outputs based on information provided by their sensory apparatus. Studies of genetic recombination, lysogeny, antibiotic resistance and my own work on transposable elements (...)
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  5. Gut feelings of safety: Tolerance to the microbiota mediated by innate immune receptors.Bartlomiej Swiatczak & Irun R. Cohen - 2015 - Microbiology and Immunology 59 (10):573-585.
    To enable microbial colonisation of the gut mucosa, the intestinal immune system must not only react to danger signals but also recognize cues that indicate safety. Safety recognition, paradoxically, is mediated by the same environmental sensors that are involved in signalling danger. Indeed, in addition to their well established role in inducing inflammation in response to stress signals, pattern recognition receptors (PRRs) and a variety of metabolic sensors also promote gut-microbiota symbiosis by responding to "microbial symbiosis factors", "resolution-associated molecular patterns", (...)
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  6. Gesundheit – hohes oder höchstes Gut? Über den Wert und Stellenwert der Gesundheit.Ulrich Diehl - 2005 - In Hermes Andreas Kick (ed.), Gesundheitswesen zwischen Wirtschaftlichkeit und Menschlichkeit. LIST. pp. 10--113.
    Was kann ein Philosoph dazu beitragen, dass wir uns nicht nur ein adäquates Bild vom tatsächlichen Gesundheitswesen machen, sondern auch verstehen, wie in der Gesundheitspolitik ökonomische Rationalität dem übergeordneten Ziel der Realisierung humaner Verhältnisse dienen könnte? Wenn er kein weltfremder Utopist ist, dann wird er zunächst einmal anerkennen, dass die ökonomische Rationalität und die rechtsstaatliche Regulierung des Gesundheitswesens selbst schon notwendige Bedingungen für die Realisierung von Humanität sind. Denn humane Verhältnisse im Gesundheitswesen sind unter den Realbedingungen von mehr oder weniger (...)
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  7. Handlung, gut/böse.Steffi Schadow - 2015 - In Marcus Willaschek, Georg Mohr & Jürgen Stolzenberg (eds.), Kant-Lexikon in drei Bänden. de Gruyter. pp. 996-998.
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  8. Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder.Ryan P. Doran - 2022 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (5):88-146.
    I offer the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust. I advance three main lines of argument in support of this thesis. First, ugliness and disgustingness tend to lie in the same kinds of things and properties (the argument from ostensions). Second, the thesis is better placed than all existing accounts to accommodate the following facts: ugliness is narrowly and systematically distributed in a heterogenous set of things, ugliness is sometimes enjoyed, and (...)
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  9. Perpetrator Disgust: The Moral Limits of Gut Feelings.Ditte Marie Munch-Jurisic - 2022 - New York City, New York, USA: Oxford University Press.
    "What is the significance of our gut feelings? Can they disclose our deep selves or point to a shared human nature? The phenomenon of perpetrator disgust provides a uniquely insightful perspective by which to consider such questions. Across time and cultures, some individuals exhibit signs of distress while committing atrocities. They experience nausea, convulse, and vomit. Do such bodily responses reflect a moral judgment, a deep-seated injunction against atrocity? What conclusions can we draw about the relationship of our gut feelings (...)
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  10. Mensch, gut siehst du aus! Ethische Betrachtung der heutigen Körperoptimierung: Balancing Autonomie und Fremdbestimmung.Anna Puzio - 2023 - In Sebastian Kistler, Anna Puzio, Anna-Maria Riedl & Werner Veith (eds.), Digitale Transformationen der Gesellschaft. Sozialethische Perspektiven auf den technologischen Wandel. pp. 73-93.
    Ob im Fitnessstudio, in der Mode oder bei der Ernährung – heute wird ständig Körperoptimierung betrieben. Durch neue technologische Entwicklungen wie Neuroimplantate und Brain-Computer-Interfaces (neurologisches Enhancement) wird die Körperoptimierung auf eine neue Ebene gehoben. Mittels Pharmazeutika sollen Kognition (kognitives Enhancement) oder moralische Verhaltensweisen (moralisches Enhancement) verbessert werden, Prothesen werden in den Körper integriert und es werden ästhetisch-chirurgische Eingriffe vorgenommen. 2019 wurden insgesamt 983.432 ästhetische Eingriffe in Deutschland unternommen.1 Im Alltag sind Wearables wie Smartwatches mit ihren Fitnessprogrammen und vielfältige Smartphone-Apps zur (...)
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  11.  87
    Humans as bacteria? Cultural immunology in contemporary Japan.Natalia Anna Michna & Leszek Sosnowski - 2025 - Cogent 12 (1):1-14.
    The starting point for the considerations in the article is the statement of Keiko Yamanaka that the Japanese know nothing about resistance to the bacterium represented by another human being. In the article, however, we put forward the thesis that Japanese culture has developed a collective immune system resulting not from individual but from shared systemic immunology in connection with the performance of family, professional and social functions. The analysis of Japanese ‘cultural immunology’ includes an examination of the ways of (...)
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  12. Molecular Characterization of Aerobic Heterohophic Bacteria Isolated from Petroleum Hydrocarbon Polluted Brackish Waters of Bodo Creeks, Rivers State Nigeria.Tersagh Ichor - 2014 - Open Journal of Ecology 4:715-722.
    Surface water sources in the oil producing Niger Delta region of Nigeria are highly susceptible to pollution by petroleum hydrocarbons and so it is important to understand the microbial diversity of such ecosystems. Water and sediment samples were collected between April-August, 2013 from Bodo creeks and taken to Environmental Microbiology laboratory of University of Portharcourt for analysis. A total of thirty aerobic heterotrophic bacterial strains isolated ranged from 3.0 - 7.0 × 104 cfu for surface water and 1.6 - 5.6 (...)
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  13. Healing the Trauma of the Body/Mind Split through Accessing Instinctual Gut Feelings.Silver Love & Martha Love - 2008 - Somatics Magazine-Journal of the Mind/Body Arts and Sciences (4):40-49.
    For the full text of this article see "Download Options PhiPapers Archive and click Download from Archive" at the bottom of this page. First 500 words of article: To my surprise last spring, an article titled “Gut Almighty”, which briefly explained the latest emotion theories on how intuition comes from the gut, was featured in Psychology Today (Flora, 2007) at the same time that my article on gut instinctual somatic responses and healthy life choices was published in Somatics Spring 07 (...)
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  14. Schön oder gut?Olaf Müller - 2022 - In Dieter Sturma (ed.), Natur, Ethik und Ästhetik. Brill mentis. pp. 215-243.
    Wie viele empirische Daten auch immer wir zusammentragen mögen: es sind nie ausschließlich diese Daten, die bei unserer theoretischen Arbeit den Ausschlag geben. Ob wir eine Naturwissenschaftliche Theorie akzepieren, hängt nicht alleine davon ab, wie exakt sie zur Empirie passt ( also zu den Daten aus Beobachtungen und Versuchsergebnissen), sondern auch von weiteren - außerempirischen - Kriterien. Eines dieser Kriterien stützt sich auf unseren Schönheitssinn. Wie ein Blick in die Geschichte der Physik ohne jeden Zweifel lehrt, spielt der Sinn für (...)
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  15. Algae communication, conspecific and interspecific: the concepts of phycosphere and algal-bacteria consortia in a photobioreactor (PBR).Sergio Mugnai, Natalia Derossi & Yogi Hale Hendlin - 2023 - Plant Signaling and Behavior 18.
    Microalgae in the wild often form consortia with other species promoting their own health and resource foraging opportunities. The recent application of microalgae cultivation and deployment in commercial photobioreactors (PBR) so far has focussed on single species of algae, resulting in multi-species consortia being largely unexplored. Reviewing the current status of PBR ecological habitat, this article argues in favor of further investigation into algal communication with conspecifics and interspecifics, including other strains of microalgae and bacteria. These mutualistic species form (...)
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  16. Irrationality and “Gut” Reasoning: Two Kinds of Truthiness.Amber L. Griffioen - 2009 - In Jason Holt (ed.), The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News. Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 309-325.
    There are at least three basic phenomena that philosophers traditionally classify as paradigm cases of irrationality. In the first two cases, wishful thinking and self-deception, a person wants something to be true and therefore ignores certain relevant facts about the situation, making it appear to herself that it is, in fact, true. The third case, weakness of will, involves a person undertaking a certain action, despite taking herself to have an all-things-considered better reason not to do so. While I think (...)
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  17. Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut feelings: Short cuts to better decision making. [REVIEW]Christine Clavien - 2010 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (1):113-115.
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  18. Mental evolution: a review of Daniel Dennett’s From Bacteria to Bach and Back. [REVIEW]Charles A. Rathkopf - 2017 - Biology and Philosophy 32 (6):1355-1368.
    From Bacteria To Bach and Back is an ambitious book that attempts to integrate a theory about the evolution of the human mind with another theory about the evolution of human culture. It is advertised as a defense of memes, but conceptualizes memes more liberally than has been done before. It is also advertised as a defense of the proposal that natural selection operates on culture, but conceptualizes natural selection as a process in which nearly all interesting parameters are (...)
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  19. Introduction: Key Levels of Biocommunication of Bacteria.Guenther Witzany - 2010 - In Günther Witzany (ed.), Biocommunication in Soil Microorganisms. Springer. pp. 1--34.
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  20. Philosophie, Sprache, Erkenntnis, Wahrheit, Sein, Gut.Rafael Ferber - 2008 - Munich: C. H. Beck.
    The book (1994, revised and enlarged 8th edition 2008) provides an introduction to six key concepts in philosophy – philosophy, language, knowledge, truth, being and good. At the same time, it aims to initiate its readers into the process of philosophical thinking. The book is addressed to students and laypeople, but also contains new ideas for specialists. It is written in a clear, accessible and engaging style, and its author ‘shares, and manages to convey, something of Plato's own commitment to (...)
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  21. 'Next Time Try Looking it up in your Gut!!': Tolerance, Civility, and Healthy Conflict in a Tea Party Era.Jason A. Springs - 2011 - Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 94 (3-4):325-358.
    In this paper I critically explore the possibility that the hope for engaging in democratic discourse and coalition-building across deep— potentially irreconcilable— moral, religious divisions in current U.S. public life depends less upon further calls for “more tolerance,” and instead in thinking creatively and transformatively about how to democratize and constructively utilize conflict and intolerance. Is it possible to distinguish between constructive and destructive forms of intolerance? If so, what are the prospects for re-orienting analysis of democratic practices and processes (...)
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  22. Wann ist eine Definition von 'Kunst' gut?Daniel Cohnitz - manuscript
    n diesem Kapitel soll das Problem ›Was genstand dieses Kapitels. Wir werden sehen, ist Kunst?‹, wie es sich für die analytische dass sich diese Adäquatheitsbedingungen aus Kunstphilosophie stellt, erläutert und eine Reiunserer Auffassung von analytischer Philosohe von »Adäquatheitsbedingungen« für seine phie heraus begründen lassen. Dieses zweite möglichen Lösungen formuliert werden. Adä- Kapitel bereitet also gewissermaßen den theoquatheitsbedingungen sind dabei Anforderunretischen Boden für die Folgekapitel. gen, die wir an eine potentielle Problemlösung Wie aus der Charakterisierung der analystellen und die eine Bewertung (...)
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  23. Review of Brad Spellberg, Rising Plague: The Global Threat from Deadly Bacteria and Our Dwindling Arsenal to Fight Them. [REVIEW]Jonny Anomaly - 2010 - American Journal of Bioethics 10 (11):39-41.
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  24. Review of Daniel C. Dennett's From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds[REVIEW]Hane Htut Maung - 2020 - Synthesis Philosophica 35 (1):267-270.
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  25. What Philosophy Can Do, by Gary Gutting. [REVIEW]Matthew Van Cleave - 2016 - Teaching Philosophy 39 (3):390-394.
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  26. Clonal complexes in biomedical ontologies.Albert Goldfain, Lindsay Cowell & Barry Smith - 2009 - In Barry Smith (ed.), ICBO 2009: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Biomedical Ontology. Buffalo: NCOR. pp. 168.
    An accurate classification of bacteria is essential for the proper identification of patient infections and subsequent treatment decisions. Multi-Locus Sequence Typing (MLST) is a genetic technique for bacterial classification. MLST classifications are used to cluster bacteria into clonal complexes. Importantly, clonal complexes can serve as a biological species concept for bacteria, facilitating an otherwise difficult taxonomic classification. In this paper, we argue for the inclusion of terms relating to clonal complexes in biomedical ontologies.
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  27. The biosemiotic implications of 'bacterial wisdom'.Felipe-Andres Piedra & Donald R. Frohlich - manuscript
    Eshel Ben-Jacob’s manuscript entitled ‘Bacterial wisdom, Gödel’s theorem and creative genomic webs’ summarizes decades of work demonstrating adaptive mutagenesis in bacterial genomes. Bacterial genomes, each an essential part of a Kantian whole that is a single bacterium, are thus not independent of the environment as sensed; and a single bacterium is therefore a semiotic entity. Ben-Jacob suggests this but errs in 1) assigning autonomy to the genome, and 2) analogizing through computation without making clear whether he is doing so for (...)
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  28. A missing element in reports of divine encounters.Ronald R. Johnson - 2004 - Religious Studies 40 (3):351-360.
    Many people claim to have had direct perceptual awareness of God. William Alston, Richard Swinburne, Gary Gutting, and others have based their philosophical views on these reports. But using analogies from our encounters with humans whose abilities surpass our own, we realize that something essential is missing from these reports. The absence of this element renders it highly unlikely that these people have actually encountered a divine being. (Published Online August 11 2004).
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  29. The significances of bacterial colony patterns.James A. Shapiro - 1995 - Bioessays 17 (7):597-607.
    Bacteria do many things as organized populations. We have recently learned much about the molecular basis of intercellular communication among prokaryotes. Colonies display bacterial capacities for multicellular coordination which can be useful in nature where bacteria predominantly grow as films, chains, mats and colonies. E. coli colonies are organized into differentiated non-clonal populations and undergo complex morphogenesis. Multicellularity regulates many aspects of bacterial physiology, including DNA rearrangement systems. In some bacterial species, colony development involves swarming (active migration of (...)
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  30. Love in the Time of Antibiotic Resistance: How Altruism Might Be Our Best Hope.Dien Ho - 2017 - In Philosophical Issues in Pharmaceutics: Development, Dispensing, and Use. Dordrecht: Springer.
    Antibiotic-resistant bacteria pose a serious threat to our health. Our ability to destroy deadly bacteria by using antibiotics have not only improved our lives by curing infections, it also allows us to undertake otherwise dangerous treatments from chemotherapies to invasive surgeries. The emergence of antibiotic resistance, I argue, is a consequence of various iterations of prisoner’s dilemmas. To wit, each participant (from patients to nations) has rational self-interest to pursue a course of action that is suboptimal for all (...)
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  31. Niche construction and teleology: organisms as agents and contributors in ecology, development, and evolution.Bendik Hellem Aaby & Hugh Desmond - 2021 - Biology and Philosophy 36 (5):1-20.
    Niche construction is a concept that captures a wide array of biological phenomena, from the environmental effects of metabolism to the creation of complex structures such as termite mounds and beaver dams. A central point in niche construction theory is that organisms do not just passively undergo developmental, ecological, or evolutionary processes, but are also active participants in them Evolution: From molecules to men, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983; Laland KN, Odling-Smee J, Feldman MW, In: KN Laland and T Uller (...)
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  32. The Ontology of Organismic Agency: A Kantian Approach.Hugh Desmond & Philippe Huneman - 2020 - In Andrea Altobrando & Pierfrancesco Biasetti (eds.), Natural Born Monads: On the Metaphysics of Organisms and Human Individuals. De Gruyter. pp. 33-64.
    Biologists explain organisms’ behavior not only as having been programmed by genes and shaped by natural selection, but also as the result of an organism’s agency: the capacity to react to environmental changes in goal-driven ways. The use of such ‘agential explanations’ reopens old questions about how justified it is to ascribe agency to entities like bacteria or plants that obviously lack rationality and even a nervous system. Is organismic agency genuinely ‘real’ or is it just a useful fiction? (...)
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  33. Only All Naturalists Should Worry About Only One Evolutionary Debunking Argument.Tomas Bogardus - 2016 - Ethics 126 (3):636-661.
    Do the facts of evolution generate an epistemic challenge to moral realism? Some think so, and many “evolutionary debunking arguments” have been discussed in the recent literature. But they are all murky right where it counts most: exactly which epistemic principle is meant to take us from evolutionary considerations to the skeptical conclusion? Here, I will identify several distinct species of evolutionary debunking argument in the literature, each one of which relies on a distinct epistemic principle. Drawing on recent work (...)
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  34. Coordinating virus research: The Virus Infectious Disease Ontology.John Beverley, Shane Babcock, Gustavo Carvalho, Lindsay G. Cowell, Sebastian Duesing, Yongqun He, Regina Hurley, Eric Merrell, Richard H. Scheuermann & Barry Smith - 2024 - PLoS ONE 1.
    The COVID-19 pandemic prompted immense work on the investigation of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Rapid, accurate, and consistent interpretation of generated data is thereby of fundamental concern. Ontologies––structured, controlled, vocabularies––are designed to support consistency of interpretation, and thereby to prevent the development of data silos. This paper describes how ontologies are serving this purpose in the COVID-19 research domain, by following principles of the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry and by reusing existing ontologies such as the Infectious Disease Ontology (...)
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  35. Advancements in microbial-mediated radioactive waste bioremediation: A review.Chuck Chuan Ng - 2024 - Journal of Environmental Radioactivity 280 (December 2024):107530.
    The global production of radioactive wastes is expected to increase in the coming years as more countries have resorted to adopting nuclear power to decrease their reliance on fossil-fuel-generated energy. Discoveries of remediation methods that can remove radionuclides from radioactive wastes, including those discharged to the environment, are therefore vital to reduce risks-upon-exposure radionuclides posed to humans and wildlife. Among various remediation approaches available, microbe-mediated radionuclide remediation have limited reviews regarding their advances. This review provides an overview of the sources (...)
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  36. Are plants cognitive? A reply to Adams.Miguel Segundo-Ortin & Paco Calvo - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 73:64-71.
    According to F. Adams [this journal, vol. 68, 2018] cognition cannot be realized in plants or bacteria. In his view, plants and bacteria respond to the here-and-now in a hardwired, inflexible manner, and are therefore incapable of cognitive activity. This article takes issue with the pursuit of plant cognition from the perspective of an empirically informed philosophy of plant neurobiology. As we argue, empirical evidence shows, contra Adams, that plant behavior is in many ways analogous to animal behavior. (...)
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  37. Beyond categorical definitions of life: a data-driven approach to assessing lifeness.Christophe Malaterre & Jean-François Chartier - 2019 - Synthese 198 (5):4543-4572.
    The concept of “life” certainly is of some use to distinguish birds and beavers from water and stones. This pragmatic usefulness has led to its construal as a categorical predicate that can sift out living entities from non-living ones depending on their possessing specific properties—reproduction, metabolism, evolvability etc. In this paper, we argue against this binary construal of life. Using text-mining methods across over 30,000 scientific articles, we defend instead a degrees-of-life view and show how these methods can contribute to (...)
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  38. How to count biological minds: symbiosis, the free energy principle, and reciprocal multiscale integration.Matthew Sims - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):2157-2179.
    The notion of a physiological individuals has been developed and applied in the philosophy of biology to understand symbiosis, an understanding of which is key to theorising about the major transition in evolution from multi-organismality to multi-cellularity. The paper begins by asking what such symbiotic individuals can help to reveal about a possible transition in the evolution of cognition. Such a transition marks the movement from cooperating individual biological cognizers to a functionally integrated cognizing unit. Somewhere along the way, did (...)
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  39. On Cognitive Modeling and Other Minds.J. P. Gamboa - 2024 - Philosophy of Science 91 (3):615-633.
    Scientists and philosophers alike debate whether various systems such as plants and bacteria exercise cognition. One strategy for resolving such debates is to ground claims about nonhuman cognition in evidence from mathematical models of cognitive capacities. In this article, I show that proponents of this strategy face two major challenges: demarcating phenomenological models from process models and overcoming underdetermination by model fit. I argue that even if the demarcation problem is resolved, fitting a process model to behavioral data is, (...)
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  40. Making Sense of the Cotard Syndrome: Insights from the Study of Depersonalisation.Alexandre Billon - 2016 - Mind and Language 31 (3):356-391.
    Patients suffering from the Cotard syndrome can deny being alive, having guts, thinking or even existing. They can also complain that the world or time have ceased to exist. In this article, I argue that even though the leading neurocognitive accounts have difficulties meeting that task, we should, and we can, make sense of these bizarre delusions. To that effect, I draw on the close connection between the Cotard syndrome and a more common condition known as depersonalisation. Even though they (...)
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  41. Principles of Information Processing and Natural Learning in Biological Systems.Predrag Slijepcevic - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 52 (2):227-245.
    The key assumption behind evolutionary epistemology is that animals are active learners or ‘knowers’. In the present study, I updated the concept of natural learning, developed by Henry Plotkin and John Odling-Smee, by expanding it from the animal-only territory to the biosphere-as-a-whole territory. In the new interpretation of natural learning the concept of biological information, guided by Peter Corning’s concept of “control information”, becomes the ‘glue’ holding the organism–environment interactions together. The control information guides biological systems, from bacteria to (...)
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  42. Genomic Stress Responses Drive Lymphocyte Evolvability: An Ancient and Ubiquitous Mechanism.Bartlomiej Swiatczak - 2020 - Bioessays 42 (10):2000032.
    Somatic diversification of antigen receptor genes depends on the activity of enzymes whose homologs participate in a mutagenic DNA repair in unicellular species. Indeed, by engaging error-prone polymerases, gap filling molecules and altered mismatch repair pathways, lymphocytes utilize conserved components of genomic stress response systems, which can already be found in bacteria and archaea. These ancient systems of mutagenesis and repair act to increase phenotypic diversity of microbial cell populations and operate to enhance their ability to produce fit variants (...)
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  43. Why and how to naturalize semiotic concepts for biosemiotics.Tommi Vehkavaara - 2002 - Sign Systems Studies 30 (1):293-312.
    Any attempt to develop biosemiotics either towards a new biological ground theory or towards a metaphysics of living nature necessitates some kind of naturalization of its semiotic concepts. Instead of standard physicalistic naturalism, a certain kind of semiotic naturalism is pursued here. The naturalized concepts are defined as referring only to the objects of our external experience. When the semiotic concepts are applied to natural phenomena in biosemiotics, there is a risk of falling into anthropomorphic errors if the semiotic concepts (...)
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  44. Microbial diversity and the “lower-limit” problem of biodiversity.Christophe Malaterre - 2013 - Biology and Philosophy 28 (2):219-239.
    Science is now studying biodiversity on a massive scale. These studies are occurring not just at the scale of larger plants and animals, but also at the scale of minute entities such as bacteria and viruses. This expansion has led to the development of a specific sub-field of “microbial diversity”. In this paper, I investigate how microbial diversity faces two of the classical issues encountered by the concept of “ biodiversity ”: the issues of defining the units of biodiversity (...)
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  45. The discovery of archaea: from observed anomaly to consequential restructuring of the phylogenetic tree.Michael Fry - 2024 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 46 (2):1-38.
    Observational and experimental discoveries of new factual entities such as objects, systems, or processes, are major contributors to some advances in the life sciences. Yet, whereas discovery of theories was extensively deliberated by philosophers of science, very little philosophical attention was paid to the discovery of factual entities. This paper examines historical and philosophical aspects of the experimental discovery by Carl Woese of archaea, prokaryotes that comprise one of the three principal domains of the phylogenetic tree. Borrowing Kuhn’s terminology, this (...)
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  46. Mechanist idealisation in systems biology.Dingmar van Eck & Cory Wright - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):1555-1575.
    This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering (...)
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  47. Invasion of the Mind Snatchers. On memes and cultural parasites.Maarten Boudry - unknown
    In this commentary on Daniel Dennett's 'From Bacteria to Bach and Back', I make some suggestions to strengthen the meme concept, in particular the hypothesis of cultural parasitism. This is a notion that has both caused excitement among enthusiasts and raised the hackles of critics. Is the “meme” meme itself an annoying piece of malware, which has infected and corrupted the mind of an otherwise serious philosopher? Or is it an indispensable theoretical tool, as Dennett believes, which deserves to (...)
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  48. Ethical Life After Humanism.Hasana Sharp & Cynthia Willett - 2016 - In Hasana Sharp & Chloë Taylor (eds.), Feminist Philosophies of Life. Chicago: Mcgill-Queen's University Press. pp. 67-84.
    In this essay, we aim to ground an alliance between Cynthia Willett’s theory of an ethics of eros and Hasana Sharp’s argument for a politics of renaturalization. Both approaches seek a vocabulary and practices for ethical life, which is not circumscribed by the requirement of rationality and is deeply attentive to relationships. The relations to which an ethics of eros and renaturalization must attend include social relations – the tender ministrations of mothers, lovers, and friends that sustain and nourish (and (...)
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  49. natural intelligence and anthropic reasoning.Predrag Slijepcevic - 2020 - Biosemiotics 13 (tba):1-23.
    This paper aims to justify the concept of natural intelligence in the biosemiotic context. I will argue that the process of life is (i) a cognitive/semiotic process and (ii) that organisms, from bacteria to animals, are cognitive or semiotic agents. To justify these arguments, the neural-type intelligence represented by the form of reasoning known as anthropic reasoning will be compared and contrasted with types of intelligence explicated by four disciplines of biology – relational biology, evolutionary epistemology, biosemiotics and the (...)
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  50. In Defense of Wishful Thinking: James, Quine, Emotions, and the Web of Belief.Alexander Klein - 2017 - In Sarin Marchetti & Maria Baghramian (eds.), Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology Before the Great Divide. London and New York: Routledge. pp. 228-250.
    What is W. V. O. Quine’s relationship to classical pragmatism? Although he resists the comparison to William James in particular, commentators have seen an affinity between his “web of belief” model of theory confirmation and James’s claim that our beliefs form a “stock” that faces new experience as a corporate body. I argue that the similarity is only superficial. James thinks our web of beliefs should be responsive not just to perceptual but also to emotional experiences in some cases; Quine (...)
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