Working in close collaboration with medical scientists (immunologists, oncologists, etc.), researchers in philosophy and social and human sciences will naturally find their place in this new epistemology project, which aims to contribute to the international debate on models of understanding certain biological phenomena that remain relatively unknown, such as the immune response. This new axis aims to develop a philosophy of medicine and life in order to create a link with other research units that wish to collaborate with ADES on questions of the normal and the pathological.
In view of the skills in philosophy that have strengthened its staff during the past year, a new axis oriented towards an epistemological approach to the body and norms in health is envisaged for the next five-year period. This emerging project will enrich the notion of norm by apprehending it from a different angle than that of "social norm" which prevails in the team's other axes. The specificity of this new axis, compared to the other axes, will be to focus on the vital norms that the body implements to defend itself against the "aggression" of infectious agents from the external environment. The aim of this axis will be, first of all, to carry out an inventory of the available knowledge concerning the use of the concept of "norm" in the medical sciences, taking immunology as a guiding thread and as a gateway to the field of epistemology for our team.
This concerted choice in favor of immunology as a privileged object of study has three main reasons:
- The presence in this axis of researchers in philosophy (1 PU, 1 ATER, 1 PhD student) is a guarantee of the relevance of epistemological work on a branch of medicine which has the particularity of calling upon conceptual resources coming from the field of philosophy and the human sciences.
- In the 20th century, the concept of "self", in its opposition to "non-self", contributed to the understanding of the immune phenomenon by means of theoretical tools that could be falsified, eligible for empirical refutability tests.
- The involvement alongside researchers in philosophy of physician-researchers, including Dr. Romain Lutaud, who will submit a thesis in health anthropology in March 2023 on "Scientific controversies: the cases of Lyme disease and Covid-19", the participation of Pr.
- The
- relevance of the notion of immunity with regard to the expectations of the tutelles and the HCERES concerning "the opening of science to society"
- Indeed, the supra-academic scope of the notion of immunity is strong during health crisis episodes and is a source of numerous controversies not only within the scientific community but also in the public space. Today, the question of immunity is variously declined within debates of society around the effectiveness of vaccines, auto-immune diseases, immunotherapy in cancerology, the question of resistance to antibiotic therapy, "natural immunology", etc. As a result, there is an obvious link between vital norms and social norms, offering avenues of collaboration with other areas of the team, but also with the
team "Biology of blood cells and anthropology" insofar as immunology is also a relevant research theme for the team working on the problem of graft rejection in hematology.
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To
implement these two projects, the researchers in this axis will interact with interested AMU research laboratories in order to develop new institutional partnerships and enrich the team's academic ecosystem. In terms of scientific strategy, the creation of an axis centered on epistemology will be a vector of rapprochements with the UMR "Centre Gilles Gaston Granger" (CGGG) of Aix-en-Provence. The UMR CGGG of Aix is indeed a national unit in philosophy of sciences and whose director, Prof. Pascal Taranto, wishes to collaborate with ours around a reflexive approach of medical sciences. Relationships have already been established during the past contract, since PUs from the philosophy team of the Aix-en-Provence site have given courses in the framework of the "ethics" course of the Master's degree in Medical Humanities at the Mediterranean Ethical Space in Marseille. Reciprocally, philosophers from the "Corps, normes, santé" team have given courses at the Faculty of Philosophy of Aix-en-Provence.