In this paper we criticize the existing contradictions in the context of bone marrow donor records in Spain. On the one hand there is the necessity to register as many patients as possible to maximize the opportunities to access a bone marrow transplant and on the other the always important economic issue of having to perform the relevant histocompatibility tests. In fact, these records are globally coordinated with each other to provide a wide range of potential donors and make better (...) use of existing resources. It should be noted that many patients who should have a transplant but who do not achieve a sufficient donor support must follow a medical treatment with high economic costs with tragic results for many of them. For example, those suffering from certain types of leukemia, when not finding that compatible donor, must follow chemotherapy-based treatments. There are also cord blood units banks which allow performing these transplants, also coordinated at the international level. Therefore, according to the principle of reciprocity, it is not justifiable that some countries are doing an important economic effort to have a large registration while others take advantage without making an equivalent effort according to their economic and population size. (shrink)

This monographic issue contains a long article bringing together the Lullius Lectures delivered by Professor Sandra Mitchell during the Xth Conference of the Society of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science in Spain, that took place in Salamanca (16-19 November, 2021). The publication of her Lectures is complemented by six original articles that address and examine different aspects of Sandra Mitchell’s contributions to the philosophy of science. In this introduction to the monograph, the editors present the broad outlines of the (...) Lullius Lectures given by Mitchell on the landscape of integrative pluralism. We accompany this overview with a review of some of the fundamental concepts of her philosophy as reviewed and discussed by the original articles included in the monograph on integrative pluralism (Deulofeu & Suárez, 2023; and Van Der Merwe, 2023), emergence (Onnis, 2023), scientific laws (Andersen, 2023; and Plutynski, 2023), and realism (Bertolaso & Sterpetti, 2023). (shrink)

François Jacob viewed the living world as interconnected by reproductive links, suggesting that biology should not limit itself to studying individual organisms given their ephemeral nature. He believed that reproduction was the cause and purpose of life, asserting that the genetic program played a crucial role in physiology and evolutionary biology, offering a potential unifying framework for biology. While acknowledging the importance of Jacob’s idea of reproduction as a nexus, there are criticisms regarding his reliance on genetic programs. Various approaches (...) to understanding the causes of reproduction—including formal, material, and externally scaffolded factors—are explored and highlight some perspectives that extend beyond the concept of genetic programming. Furthermore, criticisms and objections to the organizational aspects and significance of reproduction in life are addressed. Finally, the relational nature of reproduction is presented as a crucial aspect that necessitates considering collaborative and distributed models. (shrink)

EI objetivo de este artículo es analizar ciertas críticas a la aplicación de la nocion de informacíon en biología, teniendo en cuenta tanto la historia del concepto como las diferentes posiciones actuales. Creemos que la motivacíon principal de las críticas es negar que los genes sean un factor causal excepcional en el desarrollo, y favorecer la imagen de la vida como un sistema organizado que requiere diferentes recursos. Aunque compartimos el rechazo deI reduccionismo genetico, argumentamos que éste no es atribuible (...) a la analogía informacional y que, por tanto, no es necesario abandonarla completamente.The goal of this article is to analize certain criticisms to the notion of information in biology, taking into account both the history of the concept and some recent positions. We think that the main motivation behind the criticisms is to deny that genes are an exceptional cause in development, and to favor an image of life as an organized system that requires diffirent resources. While we share the rejection of genetic reductionism, we argue that it is not entirely due to the informational analogy and that, therefore, it is not necessary to abandon this analogy. (shrink)

En el texto que nos ocupa, Tauber insiste en la necesidad de cultivar habilidades prácticas de carácter moral para que los médicos puedan cumplir su cometido. Su argumento central es que la práctica de la medicina debe concebirse como una interacción entre sujetos y abandonar el modelo actual, que ha reducido esa interacción a una relación entre sujeto y objeto . Tauber considera que dicha reducción es debida a la cientifización de la actividad sanitaria que, primero, observa al enfermo como (...) objeto de estudio neutral e impersonal de una medicina concebida como una ciencia natural, y ulteriormente trata de rescatar al enfermo como sujeto desde la bioética y en el espacio político jurídico, de forma que se le otorgan derechos y deberes, al ser considerado dueño absoluto de sus decisiones por estar esencialmente dotado de una identidad autónoma. Pero este reconocimiento es, en opinión de Tauber, insatisfactorio, porque sucede fuera del contexto de la interacción entre médico y paciente que constituye a la medicina. Por ello, la demanda teórica central de su texto es la reintroducción de la dimensión moral en la propia práctica médica, transformando el modelo del conocimiento médico mediante una epistemología moral. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo es examinar cómo engarza la noción de autonomía biológica con las nociones de autonomía que se manejan habitualmente en filosofía. A partir de los años setenta del siglo XX, los biológos chilenos Humberto Maturana y Francisco Varela desarrollaron la teoría de la vida como autopoiesis, que origina una nueva concepción de autonomía: la autonomía biológica. El desarrollo de este concepto supone una cierta recuperación de la noción de organismo en un contexto científico en el que (...) la biología y la filosofía de la biología están marcadas por el estudio del gen, propiciado por la biología molecular, y de la evolución por selección... natural, por la llamada Síntesis Moderna. En este artículo trataremos de mostrar algunas de las implicaciones que el concepto de vida como autonomía tiene para la biología actual y cómo puede entenderse este concepto a la luz de otras nociones de autonomía más habituales en filosofía. The aim of this article is to examine how the notion of biological autonomy may be linked to other notions of autonomy usual in philosophical discussions. Starting in the 70s, the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed a theory of life as autopoiesis which gives rise to a new conception of autonomy: biological autonomy. The development of this concept implies the recovery of the notion of the organism in a scientific context in which biology and philosophy of biology are focused on the study of the gene by Molecular Biology and evolution by natural selection, by the so called Modern Synthesis. Here we try to show some implications of the concept of life as autonomy for current biology and how this concept can be related to other more usual ones in philosophy. (shrink)

J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world? Ismael is an original and creative thinker who tries to understand our problematic concepts about the self and how they are related to our use of (...) language in particular. (shrink)

Quantum mechanics seems to portray nature as nonseparable, in the sense that it allows spatiotemporally separated entities to have states that cannot be fully specified without reference to each other. This is often said to implicate some form of “holism.” We aim to clarify what this means, and why this seems plausible. Our core idea is that the best explanation for nonseparability is a “common ground” explanation, which casts nonseparable entities in a holistic light, as scattered reflections of a more (...) unified underlying reality. (shrink)

: I’m going to generalize the points that L.A. Paul makes in her Transformative Experience and push them in a somewhat different direction. I will begin by talking about transformative experience in a generic sense and say how ubiquitous it is. Then I’ll distinguish that from the strict, specialized sense of transformative experience that Paul identifies. I will say why Paul’s focus on the strict and specialized sense allows her to arrive at a strong conclusion, but bypasses the more interesting (...) lessons which concern the importance of de se imagination and the possibilities for educating it. Keywords: Transformative Experience; Laurie A. Paul; Imagination; Decision Esperienza, trasformazione, immaginazione Riassunto: Intendo generalizzare le questioni sollevate da L.A. Paul nel suo Trasformative Experience, spingendole in una direzione differente. Inizierò parlando dell’esperienza trasformativa in senso generico, illustrando quanto questa sia diffusa. Quindi distinguerò questo senso generico di esperienza trasformativa da quello più ristretto identificato da Paul. Illustrerò poi le ragioni per cui la messa a fuoco di questo senso ristretto e specifico da parte di Paul le consente di giungere a conclusioni forti, evitando però i compiti più interessanti che riguardano l’importanza dell’immaginazione de se e le possibilità di educarla. Parole chiave: Esperienza trasformativa; Laurie A. Paul; Immaginazione; Decisione. (shrink)

In 1687 Isaac Newton ushered in a new scientific era in which laws of nature could be used to predict the movements of matter with almost perfect precision. Newton's physics also posed a profound challenge to our self-understanding, however, for the very same laws that keep airplanes in the air and rivers flowing downhill tell us that it is in principle possible to predict what each of us will do every second of our entire lives, given the early conditions of (...) the universe. Can it really be that even while you toss and turn late at night in the throes of an important decision and it seems like the scales of fate hang in the balance, that your decision is a foregone conclusion? Can it really be that everything you have done and everything you ever will do is determined by facts that were in place long before you were born? This problem is one of the staples of philosophical discussion. It is discussed by everyone from freshman in their first philosophy class, to theoretical physicists in bars after conferences. And yet there is no topic that remains more unsettling, and less well understood. If you want to get behind the façade, past the bare statement of determinism, and really try to understand what physics is telling us in its own terms, read this book. The problem of free will raises all kinds of questions. What does it mean to make a decision, and what does it mean to say that our actions are determined? What are laws of nature? What are causes? What sorts of things are we, when viewed through the lenses of physics, and how do we fit into the natural order? Ismael provides a deeply informed account of what physics tells us about ourselves. The result is a vision that is abstract, alien, illuminating, and-Ismael argues-affirmative of most of what we all believe about our own freedom. Written in a jargon-free style, How Physics Makes Us Free provides an accessible and innovative take on a central question of human existence. (shrink)

The role of probability is one of the most contested issues in the interpretation of contemporary physics. In this paper, I’ll be reevaluating some widely held assumptions about where and how probabilities arise. Larry Sklar voices the conventional wisdom about probability in classical physics in a piece in the Stanford Online Encyclopedia of Philosophy, when he writes that “Statistical mechanics was the first foundational physical theory in which probabilistic concepts and probabilistic explanation played a fundamental role.” And the conventional wisdom (...) about quantum probabilities is that they are basic, not reducible to the types of probabilities we see in statistical mechanics. In the first section of this paper, I’ll argue that in fact classical physics was steeped in probability long before statistical mechanics came on the scene, specifically, that an objective measure over phase space is an indispensable component of any informative physical theory. In the next section, I’ll argue that this objective measure is the fundamental form of physical probability and that quantum probabilities can be defined in terms of it. In the last, I’ll raise some questions about the metaphysical status of the fundamental measure. (shrink)

A reading is given of Curie''s Principle that the symmetry of a cause is always preserved its effects. The truth of the principle is demonstrated and its importance, under the proposed reading, is defended.As far as I see, all a priori statements in physics have their origin in symmetry. (Weyl, Symmetry, p. 126).

Before the twentieth century, the Universe was usually imagined as a large spatially extended thing unfolding in time. The past was fixed and the future was open; unfolding was conceived as an asymmetric process of coming into being. Relativity introduced a new vision in which space and time are presented together as a single four-dimensional manifold of events. That, together with the fact that the fundamental laws of our classical theories are symmetric in time, made understanding why the past and (...) future present themselves so differently in our experience one of the central challenges of physics. The last two centuries have seen a great deal of progress in understanding various of the so-called arrows of time: the thermodynamic arrow, the cosmological arrow, the arrow of knowledge or information. There remains an outstanding piece of this puzzle that has seen little progress, one that Roger Penrose described in his beautiful paper Singularities and Time-Asymmetry in 1979 as: “The arrow most difficult to comprehend … namely the feeling of relentless forward temporal progression, according to which potentialities seem to be transformed into actualities.”I will propose that the insight needed to resolve the problem involves taking into account that we are part of the universe and that any attempt to model it as a totality involves self-reference. I will argue specifically that self-reference, against the background of a thermodynamic gradient, creates an instability in an embedded agent’s ability to know the future or even treat it as a potential object of knowledge. That instability captures the sense in which the future remains for her perpetually open and the passage of time resolves openness into the fixity of fact. (shrink)

J. T. Ismael's monograph is an ambitious contribution to metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind. She tackles a philosophical question whose origin goes back to Descartes: What am I? The self is not a mere thing among things--but if so, what is it, and what is its relationship to the world?

Quantum mechanics is, at least at first glance and at least in part, a mathematical machine for predicting the behaviors of microscopic particles — or, at least, of the measuring instruments we use to explore those behaviors — and in that capacity, it is spectacularly successful: in terms of power and precision, head and shoulders above any theory we have ever had. Mathematically, the theory is well understood; we know what its parts are, how they are put together, and why, (...) in the mechanical sense (i.e., in a sense that can be answered by describing the internal grinding of gear against gear), the whole thing performs the way it does, how the information that gets fed in at one end is converted into what comes out the other. The question of what kind of a world it describes, however, is controversial; there is very little agreement, among physicists and among philosophers, about what the world is like according to quantum mechanics. Minimally interpreted, the theory describes a set of facts about the way the microscopic world impinges on the macroscopic one, how it affects our measuring instruments, described in everyday language or the language of classical mechanics. Disagreement centers on the question of what a microscopic world, which affects our apparatuses in the prescribed manner, is, or even could be, like intrinsically ; or how those apparatuses could themselves be built out of microscopic parts of the sort the theory describes.[1.. (shrink)

First para: Before the 17th century, there was not much discussion, and little uniformity in conception, of natural laws. The rise of science in 17th century, Newton’s mathematization of physics, and the provision of strict, deterministic laws that applied equally to the heavens and to the terrestrial realm had a profound impact in transforming the philosophical imagination. A philosophical conception of physical law built on the example of Newtonian Mechanics became quickly entrenched. Between the 17th and 20th centuries, there was (...) a great deal of philosophical interest in probabilities, but probabilities were mostly regarded as having something to do with the management of opinion, not as having a fundamental role in science. Probabilities made their first appearance in an evidently ineliminable way in the laws of a fundamental theory with the advent of quantum mechanics. Quantum probabilities have come to be called ‘chances’ in the philosophical literature, and their interpretation has been one of the central problems in philosophy of science now for almost a century. There continue to be hold-outs that insist that there must be an underlying probability-free replacement for quantum mechanics and Bohmians have had some success in formulating a deterministic alternative to quantum mechanics, but most physicists accept that the probabilistic character of the quantum mechanical laws is likely to be retained in any successor theory. While physics has adjusted itself comfortably to the existence of ineliminably probabilistic laws, philosophy has not managed arrive at a stable interpretation of quantum probability. The difficulty is that there are a number of constraints that an interpretation of chance must satisfy, constraints that appear to be partially definitive of the concept and it proves to be extraordinarily difficult to meet them simultaneously. (shrink)

This chapter addresses the worry that the existence of causal antecedents to your choices means that you are causally compelled to act as you do. It begins with the folk notion of cause, leads the reader through recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts, and argues that those developments undermine the threat from causal antecedents. The discussion is then used as a model for a kind of naturalistic metaphysics that takes its lead from science, letting everyday concepts be (...) shaped and transformed by scientific developments. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine how the notion of biological autonomy may be linked to other notions of autonomy usual in philosophical discussions. Starting in the 70s, the Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed a theory of life as autopoiesis which gives rise to a new conception of autonomy: biological autonomy. The development of this concept implies the recovery of the notion of the organism in a scientific context in which biology and philosophy of biology (...) are focused on the study of the gene by Molecular Biology and evolution by natural selection, by the so called Modern Synthesis. Here we try to show some implications of the concept of life as autonomy for current biology and how this concept can be related to other more usual ones in philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend an empiricist account of modality that keeps a substantive account of modal commitment, but throws out the metaphysics. I suggest that if we pair a deflationary attitude toward representation with a substantive account of how scientific models are constructed and put to use, the result is an account that deflates the metaphysics of modal commitment without deflating the content of modal claims.

There’s a long history of discussion of probability in philosophy, but objective chance separated itself off and came into its own as a topic with the advent of a physical theory - quantum mechanics - in which chances play a central, and apparently ineliminable, role. In 1980 David Lewis wrote a paper pointing out that a very broad class of accounts of the nature of chance apparently lead to a contradiction when combined with a principle that expresses the role of (...) chance in guiding belief. There is still no settled agreement on the proper response to the Lewis problem. At the time he wrote the article, Lewis despaired of a solution, but, although he never achieved one that satisfied him completely, by 1994, due to work primarily by Thau and Hall, he had come to think the problem could be disarmed if we fudged a little on the meaning of ‘chance’. I’ll say more about this below. What I’m going to suggest, however, is that the qualification is unnecessary. The problem depends on an assumption that should be rejected, viz., that using information about chance to guide credence requires one to conditionalize on the theory of chance that one is using. I’m going to propose a general recipe for using information about chance to guide belief that does not require conditionalization on a theory of chance at any stage. Lewis’ problem doesn’t arise in this setting. (shrink)

In a famous passage drawing implications from determinism, Laplace introduced the image an intelligence who knew the positions and momenta of all of the particles of which the universe is composed, and asserted that in a deterministic universe such an intelligence would be able to predict everything that happens over its entire history. It is not, however, difficult to establish the physical possibility of a counterpredictive device, i.e., a device designed to act counter to any revealed prediction of its behavior. (...) What would happen if a Laplacean intelligence were put into communication with such a device and forced to reveal its prediction of what the device would do on some occasion? On the one hand, it seems that the Laplacean Intelligence should be able to predict the device's behavior. On the other hand, it seems like that device should be able to act counter to the prediction. An examination of the puzzle leads to clarification of what determinism does entail, with some insights about various other things along the way. (shrink)

Mechanisms occurring at the atomic level are now known to drive processes essential for life, as revealed by quantum effects on biochemical reactions. Some macroscopic characteristics of organisms may thus show an atomic imprint, which may be transferred across organisms and affect their evolution. This possibility is considered here for the first time, with the aim of elucidating the appearance of an animal innovation with an unclear evolutionary origin: migratory behaviour. This trait may be mediated by a radical pair (RP) (...) mechanism in the retinal flavoprotein cryptochrome, providing essential magnetic orientation for migration. Isotopes may affect the performance of quantum processes through their nuclear spin. Here, we consider a simple model and then apply the standard open quantum system approach to the spin dynamics of cryptochrome RP. We changed the spin quantum number (I) and g‐factor of hydrogen and nitrogen isotopes to investigate their effect on RP's yield and magnetic sensitivity. Strong differences arose between isotopes with I = 1 and I = 1/2 in their contribution to cryptochrome magnetic sensitivity, particularly regarding Earth's magnetic field strengths (25–65 µT). In most cases, isotopic substitution improved RP's magnetic sensitivity. Migratory behaviour may thus have been favoured in animals with certain isotopic compositions of cryptochrome. (shrink)

The preponderance of female stereotypes in various films has become intense. Regardless of film genre, its effect on media-saturated culture has become somehow profound. This has become a concern to many people especially to feminists. Hence, this film study is conducted to explore how the female lead characters are stereotyped in films particularly in select official James Bond 007 films. During the analysis, the researcher utilizes an adapted film analysis rubric. The results show that: 1) the leading female characters in (...) the three films analyzed are portrayed mainly as objects of Bond’s sexual desire while he establishes and maintains a chauvinistic role all throughout each film; 2) Bond engages in dualistic relationships with the lead female characters when he uses them to satisfy his own desires for a woman as a means to an end (as particularly exemplified and portrayed in the character of Countess Lisl in For Your Eyes Only); 3) the treatment of some female stereotypes in the three films analyzed is consistent, e.g. a particular stereotype of a lead female character as object of sexual desire is sustained all throughout the film. The study, therefore, concludes that the lead female characters in the select films are generally portrayed in oppressive stereotypes. Keywords: Mass Communication, lead female character, female stereotypes, James Bond007, descriptive design (qualitative film analysis), Philippines. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the formal requirements on self-describing media shed light on two elusive questions in the philosophy of mind. The first is a question that Dretske raised in Naturalizing the Mind: why do we have conscious access to the intrinsic properties of experience? In his terms, the question is: what is experience for? The second is a question that has hounded philosophy of mind since Brentano: in what sense, if any, is thought intrinsically intentional? What is the property (...) that some states have of pointing, or purporting to point, beyond themselves? The chapter also addresses the question of why we self-represent, and what advantage self-representation gives us in the fight for survival. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 31, Issue 2, pp 127 - 146 The aim of this paper is to trace Thomas Hobbes’s arguments for the rejection of spiritual possession in _Leviathan_. Several layers of Hobbes’s thought converge in this subject: his suggestion regarding the sovereign’s right to control religious doctrine; his mechanistic critique of incorporeal substances; his tirade against demonology and Pagan philosophy; his ideas about fear and the natural seeds of religion; his Biblical criticism. Hobbes’s reflections over the matter of spiritual (...) possession allowed him to simultaneously attack institutionalized and charismatic supernatural experiences, rejecting on Biblical as well as philosophical grounds the possibility of demonic and divine possession. This assault on traditional pneumatology led him to new interpretations of the notions of spirit and immateriality, a core element in _Leviathan_’s resignification of the interaction between nature and supernature. The paper will address Hobbes’s call for a civil exorcism―political, exegetical, and philosophical―against the spiritual powers that possess the Commonwealth. (shrink)

Tanto el transhumanismo como el posthumanismo filosófico han prestado una atención especial a la corporalidad humana en relación al avance tecnológico. En el presente artículo, se comienza señalando cómo ambos movimientos difieren significativamente respecto a la herencia del humanismo. Posteriormente, se aborda la noción transhumanista de la ‘libertad morfológica’ de la mano de More, Sandberg y Bostrom. A continuación, se presentan casos paradigmáticos de modificaciones corporales mediante implantes cibernéticos. En último lugar, se problematizan las cuestiones de la identidad, la corporalidad (...) y el desencuentro entre ambas corrientes respecto al ‘volcado de la mente’. (shrink)

ABSTRACT. This paper contemplates Organicism and its relation with molecular and evolutionary biology. We explore whether twentieth-first century biology is returning to positions held at the beginning of the twentieth century and then abandoned. The guiding line is a history of theoretical biology in which we distinguish three periods: 1. The 20s-30s, and the Theoretical Biology Club (Needham, Woodger, and Waddington, among others); 2. An intermediate period in the 60s-70s, in which, in spite of the eclosion of the molecular and (...) evolutionary biologies, there is some recovery of organicist positions, and 3. The present post-genomic situation, which is demanding a systemic approach. (shrink)

Dennett’s story “Where am I?” is used to set up the difficulty of locating the self in the natural world. The story is told from a first-person point of view in which the narrator maintains his identity across exchanges of brain and body, but there is no physical thing in the story that can act as bearer of his identity. The story seems to present a dilemma between Cartesian dualism and Dennett’s a “no-self” view. This chapter argues for a third (...) option. Prepersonal processes in the brain stabilize separable conceptions of self and world out of patterns in sensory information. The conception of self starts out as a mere sensorimotor point of view but gradually develops into something richer. Seeing how the first-person point of view arises is seeing how the self arises, because the self is nothing but the proper subject of a first-person point of view. (shrink)

Graphical AbstractPheomelanogenesis may have evolved as an excretory mechanism to remove excess cysteine, and in humans this might potentially confer a greater ability to avoid disease such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease, in which excess cysteine is a contributory cause.

In this paper we examine aspects of Canguilhem’s philosophy of biology, concerning the knowledge of life and its consequences on science and vitalism. His concept of life stems from the idea of a living individual, endowed with creative subjectivity and norms, a Kantian view which “disconcerts logic”. In contrast, two different approaches ground naturalistic perspectives to explore the logic of life and the logic of the living individual in the 1970s. Although Canguilhem is closer to the second, there are divergences; (...) for example, unlike them, he does not dismiss vitalism, often referring to it in his work and even at times describing himself as a vitalist. The reason may lie in their different views of science. (shrink)

The intuitive difference between a system that choreographs the motion of its parts in the service of goals of its own formulation and a system composed of a collection of parts doing their own thing without coordination has been shaken by now familiar examples of self-organization. There is a broad and growing presumption in parts of philosophy and across the sciences that the appearance of centralized information-processing and control in the service of system-wide goals is mere appearance, i.e., an explanatory (...) heuristic we have evolved to predict behavior, but one that will eventually get swept away in the advancing tide of self-organization. I argue that there is a distinction of central importance here, and that no adequate science of complex systems can dispense with it. (shrink)