Adipose tissue (AT) inflammation, a hallmark of the metabolic syndrome, is triggered by overburdened adipocytes sending out immune cell recruitment signals during obesity development. An AT immune landscape persistent throughout weight loss and regain constitutes an immune‐obesogenic memory that hinders long‐term weight loss management. Lipid‐associated macrophages (LAMs) are emerging as major players in diseased, inflamed metabolic tissues and may be key contributors to an obesogenic memory in AT. Our previous study found that LAM abundance increases with weight loss via intermittent (...) fasting (IF) in obese mice, which is driven by adipocyte p53 signalling. However, the specific signals causing LAM accumulation in AT under IF remain unknown. In this piece, we hypothesise on a range of adipocyte‐secreted signals that can harbor immune‐attractive features upon fasting/refeeding cycles. We highlight possible mechanisms including cell death signalling, matrikines, and other damage‐associated molecular patterns (DAMPs), as well as adipo(‐cyto)kines, lipid mediators, metabolites, extracellular vesicles, and epigenetic rewiring. Finally, we consider how advances in mechanisms of AT LAM recruitment gleaned from preclinical models might be translatable to long‐term weight management in humans. Thus, we provide vantage points to study signals driving monocyte recruitment, polarisation towards LAMs, and LAM retention, to harness the therapeutic potential of modulating AT LAM levels by impacting the immune‐obesogenic memory in metabolic disease. (shrink)

Este libro es un homenaje a la trayectoria intelectual y académica de la profesora María Teresa López de la Vieja, Catedrática emérita de la Universidad de Salamanca. En él se trazan algunos de los caminos que, con su obra, nos invita a transitar. El volumen recoge contribuciones de colegas de varias nacionalidades y procedentes de diversos ámbitos de reflexión que le son afines: la filosofía moral y política, la literatura, la teoría de la argumentación, los estudios feministas, las éticas aplicadas, (...) la bioética. Los capítulos que componen este libro dan voz a varias generaciones de investigadoras e investigadores que han acompañado y acompañan su andadura académica y que aquí dialogan con ella haciendo propias sus preocupaciones intelectuales. Con su participación contribuyen al justo reconocimiento de su dedicación a la labor docente e investigadora. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengersâe"one of todayâe(tm)s leading philosophers of scienceâe"goes straight to the beating heart of Whiteheadâe(tm)s thought. The product of thirty yearsâe(tm) engagement with the mathematician-philosopherâe(tm)s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault. (...) Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whiteheadâe(tm)s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whiteheadâe(tm)s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whiteheadâe(tm)s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language. âeoeTo think with Whitehead today,âe Stengers writes, âeoemeans to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.âe. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead called Isabel Scribner Stearns the most talented female philosopher in America. Drawing on Whitehead and her other teachers, Paul Weiss, C.I. Lewis, H.H. Price, and Grace de Laguna, as well as the traditions of ancient Greek philosophy, Continental Rationalism, German Idealism, and American Pragmatism, Stearns has created an epistemologically and logically sound systematic account of the ontology of individuation and the relational genesis and endurance of individual beings.

In this interview with Andrée Bergeron, Isabelle Stengers casts fresh light on the question of expertise, with which the movement of the intermittents - like other movements both yesterday and today - is now confronted. She recalls that the figure of the expert is not a contemporary « invention » and that it includes multiple realities which are rarely free of political consequences. On the contrary, the choice of the expert, the definition of acceptable questions and the degree of (...) « deafness » to « democratic events », are all eminently political problems. By acquiring the tools to ask the questions that matter to them the collective of intermittents and precarious workers has already created a « democratic event ». Now it is a matter of rising to a double challenge: for the movement, that of fabricating a collective intelligence that can transform the knowledge produced into interventions capable of making people think and feel; and for the researchers in the social science, that of succeeding in considering this event as the experimental science consider the laboratory, namely, as that which makes innovation and learning possible. Constructing the choice of a counter-expertise therefore means learning to double the struggle around what Deleuze and Guattari call axioms with a practical invention of a quite different sort, involving a minority becoming - a collective intelligence that does not contradict but creates. (shrink)

"Isabelle Stengers presents us with a new way of understanding a remarkably diverse range of sciences and their relation to a material and living world. Playing with a position both inside the practices that constitute and transform science and outside the sciences as their mode of conceptualization, Stengers explores the limits, constraints, and inventions that fuse modern science and contemporary society." Elizabeth Grosz --.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, an important conceptual battleground for democratic theorists ought to be, it would seem, the capitalist firm. We are now painfully aware that the typical model of government in so-called investor-owned companies remains profoundly oligarchic, hierarchical, and unequal. Renewing with the literature of the 1970s and 1980s on workplace democracy, a few political theorists have started to advocate democratic reforms of the workplace by relying on an analogy between firm and state. To (...) the extent that a firm is an organization comparable to the state, it too ought to be ruled along democratic lines. Our paper tests the robustness of the analogy between firm and state by considering six major objections to it: the objection from a difference in ends, the objection from shareholders’ property rights, the objection from worker’s consent, the objection from workers’ exit opportunities, the objection from workers’ expertise, and the objection from the fragility of firms. We find all of these objections wanting. While the paper does not ambition to settle the issue of workplace democracy at once, our goal is to pave the way for a more in-depth study of the ways in which firms and states can be compared and the possible implications this may have for our understanding of the nature of managerial authority and the governance of firms. (shrink)

Concerned with the interplay between science, society, and power, Isabelle Stengers offers a unique perspective on the power of scientific theories to modify society, and vice versa. 9 diagrams.

This article revisits certain aspects of the discussion originated by dissident Franciscans over the two keys conferred by Christ to Peter, bringing it into connection with the value that Ockham and John XXII accord respectively to knowledge and power in the definition of doctrine. Rather than an extraneous element in the debate, as it has often been perceived, the two-keys argument is pivotal to the proper understanding of Ockham’s ecclesiology and the pope’s own, as it serves to articulate the twin (...) notions they both advance of “authority to inquire” and “authority to determine” on a question of faith. By focusing away from the usual template of the competing claims of infallibility and sovereignty, this article hopes to bring to light the profound similarities in their respective views on doctrinal authority and the value accorded to the theological enterprise. (shrink)

The Goddess People of Avalon, a young and flourishing religious community in Glastonbury (South-England), have been defining themselvesprincipally as a revitalization of the prehistoric worship of the Great Goddess. Based on fieldwork data of the author, the article offers an introduction into the religious tradition and ritual praxis of the contemporary Goddess People. Specifically, the analysis focuses on the ritual genre of Sacred Drama with its interpretationof the general and local history of religions. The variety of recursivity (as a reference (...) to the past), which this ritual genre expresses, is examined within an analytical frame that has been developed for different forms of ritual dynamics. Particularly, the analytical concepts ritual transfer, adaptation, invention and ritual design are discussed. Within the lastyears, a change in the self-image and legitimizing strategies of the Goddess People has occurred: Whereas in their nascent years, they understood themselves as a reactualization of primordial spirituality, they tend to see themselvescurrently more as a newreligious tradition, inventing their rituals creatively and confidently. The article argues for the use of the analytical concept ritual design to describe this aspect of ritual dynamics. Thus, instead of evaluating the degree of originality of rituals from an academic point of view, the legitimizing strategiesof religious agents come to the fore. (shrink)

Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization” with values alien to women. Now, as Woolf's disloyal daughters, who have professional positions in Belgian universities, Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret, along with a collective of women scholars in Belgium and France, question their academic (...) careers and reexamine the place of women and their role in thinking, both inside and outside the university. They urge women to heed Woolf's cry—Think We Must—and to always make a fuss about injustice, cruelty, and arrogance. (shrink)

Richard Rorty notoriously maintained that philosophy is not an academic discipline. He thought that the only viable candidate for philosophy to be an academic discipline—where philosophy consists in a collection of permanent, pure topics—depends on a Cartesian conceptual framework. Once we overcome this framework, he maintained, there will be nothing left to be the distinct subject matter of philosophy. This article argues that there is a conception of philosophy that can be an academic discipline, even if we take Rorty's challenge (...) seriously. It remains even if we overcome the Cartesian conceptual framework. In the end the article goes beyond Rorty's challenge and considers two further criteria for philosophy to be an academic discipline: that it have a distinct method, and that it be able to be done for the public good. The article argues that philosophy can fulfill these two criteria, and therefore that it can be an academic discipline. (shrink)

Johan Grimonprez’s dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y has been critically surveyed for its use of mass media: this film, a masterful feat of editing, appropriates found footage from television newscasts to examine the history of hijacking. My reading of this piece further analyzes Grimonprez’s use of appropriation, locating the image of the chimera featured in the film as a symbol of the method of montage that dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y uses, and of the links that this work makes between violence, homelessness and art making. The (...) chimera stands for the artwork itself, for the latter’s rapid sequence of disparate images functions as a grafted body. As a figment of the imagination, the chimera also stands for the constructed nature of the news event, which the film assays. Furthermore, the eloquence of the chimera’s image bespeaks the body that has lost its home. In this film, hijackings are related to homelessness; Grimonprez implies that wellsprings of violence arise from radical histories of displacement. By way of the chimera, he also suggests that art can impact society only by hijacking the images of mass culture, thus relating art making to violence. (shrink)

Offering an original contribution to the field of luxury and fashion studies, this edited collection takes a philosophical perspective, addressing the idea that humans need luxury. From this framework it delves deep into two particular dimensions of luxury, emotions and society, and concludes with cases of brand building in order to illustrate the two dimensions at work. Comparative analysis between countries is brought together with an emphasis on China. Chapters address the ongoing growth in the market, as well as the (...) significant changes in the sector brought about by fast international expansion and an increased focus on ethical supply and sustainability, making the book an insightful read for scholars of fashion business, luxury and branding. (shrink)

Gracias a la documentación conservada en la Real Academia de la Historia y a una cuidada revisión bibliográfica, se aportan nuevos datos para el conocimiento del descubrimiento y primeros estudios del epitafio del monarca aftasí, Abd Allah al-Mansur I de Badajoz.

Pregnancy and motherhood bring enormous change to one’s life. As a student of philosophy, I have struggled to find a place for myself, as a new mother, in academic life. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness examines human consciousness -- it places human experience as the starting point of philosophical inquiry. This approaches the sort of place I think human experience should rest in philosophy. If I am to claim that motherhood is academically significant, surely, this examination must begin with an (...) examination of human experience. This paper tries to root my experience of pregnancy as something that I think is academically interesting. It was through writing this paper that I found myself hopeful that my becoming a mother was not the end of my academic career, but rather presents an interesting and important new path in my philosophical journey. (shrink)

En este artículo el objetivo es leer desde las premisas de la teoría tridimensional de la justicia de Nancy Fraser, que comprende distribución, reconocimiento y paridad política, la jurisprudencia más relevante de la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos en materia de pueblos originarios. Para llevar a cabo esta tarea el texto se divide en dos partes. En la primera, se exponen los lineamientos del planteamiento de Nancy Fraser sobre la justicia y, en la segunda, se analiza con base en las (...) herramientas teórico políticas ofrecidas por esta pensadora, un conjunto de sentencias. Se concluye que la Corte IDH ha incorporado, en parte, esta perspectiva, aun cuando falta vigilar su implementación por parte de los Estados. (shrink)

"The Invention of Modern Science proposes a fruitful way of going beyond the apparently irreconcilable positions, that science is either "objective" or "socially constructed." Instead, suggests Isabelle Stengers, one of the most important and influential philosophers of science in Europe, we might understand the tension between scientific objectivity and belief as a necessary part of science, central to the practices invented and reinvented by scientists."--pub. desc.

This book offers a comprehensive presentation of the Pratyabhij philosophy (elaborated in the 10th and 11th centuries by Utpaladeva and Abhinavagupta) by showing how its main concepts arose from the confrontation of aiva religious dogmas ...

Qu’aurait pensé Paul Otlet, « l’homme qui voulait classer le monde », face à la globalisation des procédures d’évaluation, s’étendant aujourd’hui ni plus ni moins au domaine de la pensée ? Le père fondateur de la bibliographie, qui entendait inventer un système permettant la mutualisation et le partage des fruits du génie humain, verrait aujourd’hui son rêve transformé..

The global demand for information has brought in new developments in the publicity of discursive practices of many professional areas. This study takes the professional practice of International Commercial Arbitration, a mechanism to resolve business disputes outside the courts and traditionally considered as private, to explore the process of resemiotization of information, from the strategies used by corporations in their press releases to the news reports published by national and international media. It takes the theoretical concept of interdiscursivity in critical (...) genre analysis to show that texts are the result of a combination of a very complex range of resources brought about by genres, professional practices and professional cultures, which derive not only from the ‘local’ representation of the transnational arbitration process, but also from the different corporate identities and their ways of coping with the increasing publicity of the facts of arbitration. (shrink)

Evaluation scales are used in the care of elderly people. They are useful for estimating the workload, the necessary resources, the care cost, the patient’s dependency or autonomy in daily life, and/or the patient’s needs. The large number of grids already indicates their insufficiency.This article explores the stakes implied by the evaluations, which use concepts more or less clearly defined as autonomy, dependency, deficiency, incapacity. It also questions our understanding of interdependence, vulnerability, and responsibility, and their implications in the care (...) relations with elderly people. (shrink)