This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body – that is plasticity as a form of life – is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizing narratives, I draw on genealogical method to illuminate the unequal (...) distribution of plasticity across gender and ethnic groups. Finally, after analysing postgenomics as a different thought-style to genomics, I outline some of its implications for notions of plasticity. I argue that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental control of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of endless potentialities. It is instead closer to an alter-modernistic view that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community. (shrink)

A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the strategic uptake of environmental epigenetics by Indigenous researchers and policy advocates. We focus on the relationship between epigenetic processes and Indigenous views of (...) Country and health—views that locate health not in individual bodies but within relational contexts of Indigenous ontologies that embody interconnected environments of kin/animals/matter/bodies across time and space. This drawing together of Indigenous experience and epigenetic knowledge has strengthened calls for action including state-supported calls for financial reparations. We examine the consequences of this reimagining of disease responsibility in the context of “strategic biological essentialism,” a distinct form of biopolitics that, in this case, incorporates environmental determinism. We conclude that the shaping of the right to protection from biosocial injury is potentially empowering but also has the capacity to conceal forms of governance through claimants’ identification as “damaged,” thus furthering State justification of biopolitical intervention in Indigenous lives. (shrink)

Hamlet swears by his father that he will be revenged, and in this scene we have the characteristics of the social object oath: it is a word that is said and not simply thought of; it is a given word that cannot be withdrawn without braking the oath; it is a written word, which has a value insofar as is fixed in the memories; and it is a loyal word, since an oath presupposes faithfulness.

This article seeks to extend existing models of argumentation by considering an important dimension of real-life argumentative discourse: how complex argumentative discussions evolve over time. We define a complex argumentative discussion as a multi-issue discussion, in which the different issues are interrelated in the form of a hierarchy. We claim that justified reframing might be used to transform a single-issue argumentative discussion into a complex argumentative discussion. To illustrate this, we examine the Facebook discourse of the Rhodes Must Fall movement (...) in South Africa. We analyse how reframing is justified by means of arguments, allowing the protagonists to claim as legitimate their reframing of a single issue into a complex argumentative discussion. Our findings complement existing sociological research on social movements by highlighting how their goals are achieved by means of argumentative discourse. (shrink)

ArgumentD’Arcy Thompson has often been portrayed as a loner. His science of form has frequently been labeled anachronistic, idiosyncratic, and unconnected to his contemporary biology. This article aims to challenge this interpretation. Thompson's representation as a loner did not lie in the idiosyncrasies of his science, but in our own historiography. Through the use of unedited archival sources, this study shows that Thompson's biology was well-connected to an international research program – a program mainly shared by developmental biologists, physiologists, and (...) morphologists. In addition, this article also aims to propose a new interpretation of Thompson'sOn Growth and Form. Drawing on his private correspondence and published sources, the paper re-contextualizes the contents and conclusions of Thompson's seminal work. We will see that Thompson defended a particular kind of organismal biology. The bio-science he supported stemmed not only from Aristotle's zoology or Pythagorean mathematics, but had many allies among twentieth-century naturalists. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a new interpretation of the British evolutionary synthesis. The synthetic work of J. B. S. Haldane, R. A. Fisher and J. S. Huxley was characterized by both an integration of Mendelism and Darwinism and the unification of different biological subdisciplines within a coherent framework. But it must also be seen as a bold and synthetic Darwinian program in which the biosciences served as a utopian blueprint for the progress of civilization. Describing the futuristic visions of (...) these three scientists in their synthetic heydays, I show that, despite a number of important divergences, their biopolitical ideals could be biased toward a controlled and regimented utopian society. Their common ideals entailed a social order where liberal and democratic principles were partially or totally suspended in favor of bioscientific control and planning for the future. Finally, I will argue that the original redefinition of Darwinism that modern synthesizers proposed is a significant historical example of how Darwinism has been used and adapted in different contexts. The lesson I draw from this account is a venerable one: that, whenever we wish to define Darwinism, we need to recognize not only its scientific content and achievements but expose the other traditions and ideologies it may have supported. (shrink)

The article Thinking embodiment with genetics: epigenetics and postgenomic biology in embodied cognition and enactivism, written by Maurizio Meloni and Jack Reynolds, was originally published electronically on the publisher’s internet portal on 18 June 2020 without open access. With the author’ decision to opt for Open Choice the copyright of the article changed on 6 November 2020 to ©The Author 2020 and the article is forthwith distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution.

The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. This book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato's thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential.

The doctrines on the goodness or evilness of human nature maintained in ancient China respectively by Mencius and Xunzi has been interpreted mosttly as a contradition within the Confucian school. In this article it is argued that they represent two distinct , yet possible and congruous, modes of interpreting and re-elaboarting Confucius teachings, two opposing yet largerly complementary currents which have developed within the Confucian school.

The essay maintains that, despite the significant successive transformations, a ordoliberal moment operates within the neoliberal program. Ordoliberalism establishes a specific political anthropology based on the centrality of economic action and on an a-revolutionary temporality that enhances the normative continuity of the tradition. Even against the specific configurations that the State can assume, especially the democratic one, it also aims at the constant reactivation of a political as a fundamental decision in favor of the economic.

At the beginning of the twentieth century Haeckel’s biogenetic law was widely questioned. On the one hand, there were those who wanted to dismiss it altogether: ontogeny and phylogeny did not have any systematic or interesting relation. On the other hand, there were those who sought to revise it. They argued that while Haeckel’s recapitulationism might have been erroneous, this should not deter the research over the relation between evolution and development. The British embryologist Walter Garstang was one of the (...) main figures on the “revisionists” side. In this paper, I first situate Garstang’s contribution to embryology and evolution within the extraordinarily creative period of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Then, I review some of Garstang’s specific ideas in detail, especially his most well-known 1922 paper “The Theory of Recapitulation.” Finally, I look at how the demise of the biogenetic law in light of Garstang’s views—as well as from the perspective of contemporary developmental evolution—should be understood. My main concern is not about the dismissal of Haeckel’s law or the sidelining of embryology in the twentieth-century evolutionary biology. I am rather interested in exploring why Garstang’s revised version of biogenetic law—which was entirely consistent with the neo-Darwinian perspective underpinning the Modern synthesis—did not spur a major new agenda in evolutionary biology after the 1930s. (shrink)

This paper investigates the relationship between characterization frames and argumentation in activists’ discourse about the public controversy surrounding fashion sustainability. While previous studies proposing an argumentative approach to frames have acknowledged that frames are related to underlying implicit premises, how frames select certain implicit premises still needs to be systematically explained. Therefore, drawing on a theoretical framework combining Pragma dialectics (van Eemeren 2010 ) with the Argumentum Model of Topics an empirical analysis of a social media corpus has been performed (...) in order to examine the connection between characterization frames and underlying implicit premises. This paper offers both a methodological and a theoretical contribution. From a methodological point of view, it offers linguistic-discursive tools for the analysis of characterization frames. From a theoretical perspective, it shows how characterization frames contribute to construct _endoxa_, i.e. underlying implicit premises, through argumentative patterns. (shrink)

An analysis of how capitalism today produces subjectivity like any other “good,” and what would allow us to escape its hold. “Capital is a semiotic operator”: this assertion by Félix Guattari is at the heart of Maurizio Lazzarato's Signs and Machines, which asks us to leave behind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in the production of (...) subjectivity. Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, Signs and Machines shows how signs act as “sign-operators” that enter directly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic “motors” that make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements. Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics with the political theories of Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions, Signs and Machines takes on a task that is today more urgent than ever. (shrink)

Nationalism and patriotism are two of the most powerful forces shaping world history. In this paperback edition of a highly successful, wide-ranging study, Maurizio Viroli shows exactly why patriotism is a political virtue and nationalism a political vice.

This book presents a critical examination of Machiavelli's thought, combining an accessible, historically-informed account of his work with a reassessment of his central ideas and arguments. Viroli challenges the accepted interpretations of Machiavelli's work, insisting that his republicanism was based not on a commitment to virtue, greatness, and expansion, but to the ideal of civic life protected by the shield of fair laws. His detailed study of how Machiavelli composed The Prince offers a number of new interpretations and he further (...) contends that the most challenging--and underestimated--aspect of Machiavelli's thought is his philosophy of life, in particular his conceptions of love, women, irony, God, and the human condition. (shrink)

There is a growing body of scholarship that is addressing the ethics, in particular, the bioethics of space travel and colonisation. Naturally, a variety of perspectives concerning the ethical issues and moral permissibility of different technological strategies for confronting the rigours of space travel and colonisation have emerged in the debate. Approaches ranging from genetically enhancing human astronauts to modifying the environments of planets to make them hospitable have been proposed as methods. This paper takes a look at a critique (...) of human bioenhancement proposed by Mirko Garasic who argues that the bioenhancement of human astronauts is not only functional but necessary and thus morally permissible. However, he further claims that the bioethical arguments proposed for the context of space do not apply to the context of Earth. This paper forwards three arguments for how Garasic’s views are philosophically dubious: (1) when he examines our responsibility towards future generations he refers to a moral principle (which we will call the principle of mere survival) which, besides being vague, is not morally acceptable; (2) the idea that human bioenhancement is not natural is not only debatable but morally irrelevant; and (3) it is not true that the situations that may arise in space travel cannot occur on Earth. We conclude that not only is the (bio)enhancement of humans on Earth permissible but perhaps even necessary in certain circumstances. (shrink)

Realitism: the postmodern attack on reality -- Realism: things that have existed since the beginning of the world -- Reconstruction: why criticism starts from reality -- Emancipation: unexamined life has no value.

The modern family has developed in its configuration, assuming different features from the traditional family typical of the first part of last century. The typologies of family that currently exist are several and include households with a single parent, others with more than two parents, others with two different ethnicities within them, and so on. Irrespective of its structure, however, each family can be accepted as valid if fulfills the development tasks of all its members. In particular is the coexistence (...) of clearly identifiable functions and roles that can ensure children a peaceful growth. (shrink)

Résumé La généalogie du capitalisme amorcée par Foucault à la fin des années 70 ébranle ce que nous croyons savoir du libéralisme. Le constat d’Adam Smith conserve toute sa force : le politique (droits) et l’économie (intérêts) ne sont ni superposables, ni réconciliables. Le gouvernement libéral se propose d’y répondre. Englober et « passer par l’extérieur », telles sont ses tâches, et elles connaissent deux modalités d’application depuis lors, qui sont aussi deux techniques de normalisation. La première, prédominante, s’occupe du (...) gros : la discipline. La seconde, active et souterraine, s’occupe des détails : la sécurité. Elle cerne de plus près les multiplicités, la vie, les conduites. Une véritable politique des multiplicités supposerait, bien davantage encore, de passer « par l’extérieur » des agents que nous tenons pour naturels ou spontanés, mais qui sont l’objet d’un souci et d’une ré-institution constants : le marché, l’entreprise, le travailleur. (shrink)

v. 1. Il movimento neoscolastico e la fondazione della Rivista -- v. 2. La riflessione filosofica dalle pagine della Rivista.

According to the interpretation of Hegel, Egyptian religious buildings, and among them especially the temples, represent the beginning of the history of architecture, and so the beginning of the entire history of art.The Egyptian religious architecture has a symbolic character, because its configuration tries to represent the spiritual content without being fully adequate to it. So the Egyptian temple alludes to the divine through its entire structure, but does not have a proper internal space, dedicated to the worship of the (...) image of God.On this point, contemporary Egyptology corrected Hegel’s view, because broadly speaking the Egyptian temple had an interior where the image of the deity was safeguarded. However, Hegel’s thesis paradoxically remains suitable for a particular case of the Egyptian experience that he could not know at that time: in the monotheistic religion of Amarna, the temple of the sun-god Aton has no images and does not have a center, because the Divine is present everywhere, like the sunlight that illuminates equally all over the temple. (shrink)

In ancient Chinese culture, landscape constituted a fundamental element in religious, literary and artistic expressions. This contribution is intended as an imperfect and concise attempt to trace the “guidelines” – influenced above all by Daoist doctrine – of Chinese thought on landscape within the literature and pictorial art of traditional China.