The existence of a genetic program of development was proposed by molecular biologists in the nineteen-sixties. Historians and philosophers of science have since thoroughly criticized this notion. To fully appreciate its significance, it is interesting to consider the research which was pursued during this period by molecular biologists who proposed this notion. This study focuses on François Jacob's work and on the model of development supported by his lab in the early seventies, the T-complex model. This episode of (...) class='Hi'>Jacob's scientific activity has since been forgotten. Characterization of this model shows that the notion of program was used in a metaphoric way and that it did not put any constraint on the work pursued in the lab at that time. Some attention is devoted to the origin of this metaphor in the context of the nineteen-seventies. (shrink)

While the scientific contributions of François Jacob were outstanding, I also consider that his conception of science, and of its place among other forms of knowledge, is also highly original, and important for the future of science in our societies. His contributions to the history and philosophy of science were neither a hobby nor a secondary activity, but they were for him a natural complement to his scientific work. He fully opposed the concept of the two cultures, the literary (...) and the scientific, proposed by C.P. Snow. For Jacob, concepts, metaphors and models circulated between the various spheres of human activity. This is obvious in his own work. This “open” conception of scientific activity did not prevent him from defending the specificity, and the superiority, of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

François Jacob is known as one of the key figures in the history of molecular biology. His elaboration, together with Jacques Monod, of the operon model and the basic features of the regulation of gene expression in bacteria, as well as the concept of genetic messenger, won him the Nobel Prize in 1965. Both notions were decisive for the novel imagery of molecular genetics in which the notion of information came to stand central. From a close reading, this article (...) tries to reconstruct how the new language of molecular genetics took shape in the scientific writings of Jacob. In particular, it analyzes how the notions of regulation, information, and language came to be articulated, and how this articulation changed and underwent modulations over time. It shows that a scientific language consists of several layers and thus, as a rule, forms a hybrid structure. The time span covered reaches from the early experiments done together with Monod and Arthur Pardee between 1958 and 1960, also known as the “PaJaMo” experiment, to Jacob’s book on the history of heredity, The Logic of Life, which appeared in 1970. (shrink)

In this article, the concept of integron as it appears in François Jacob’s book The Logic of Life is discussed. It begins by locating the concept within the overall structure of Jacob’s book. The book is conceived as a history of heredity, with the central historical chapters framed by an epistemological discussion of the notions of program in the introductory chapter and of integron in the concluding chapter. A detailed analysis of the concept of integron follows, including that (...) of reproduction on which it relies. It is then compared with the concept of hypercycle as developed around the same time by Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster. The article concludes on a note on name-coining in the sciences with a focus on Jacob’s own practice. (shrink)

We are entering an era in which “cultural construction of the body” refers to a literal technological enterprise. This era was anticipated in the 1920s by geneticist J. B. S. Haldane in a lecture which inspired Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. In that lecture, Haldane reinterpreted the Greek myth of Daedalus and the Minotaur as heroic fable. Seventy years later another geneticist, François Jacob, used the same myth as cautionary tale. Here I explain the Minotaur's “genetic” monstrosity in terms (...) of disability and hybridity, using the movie Gattaca to argue that ancient fears of monstrously disabled bodies are being recycled as bioethics. (shrink)

Although it has not been much noticed, reproduction is the central theme of François Jacob’s important history of biology, La logique du vivant (The Logic of Life). In a book ostensibly devoted to heredity, this molecular biologist had reproduction integrate levels of organization from organisms to molecules and play a major role in each historical transition between them, not just in the influential argument for a shift “from generation to reproduction.” Moreover, I claim, La logique was the first general (...) history of (research on) reproduction. Earlier histories had tackled only aspects of generation and reproduction; none historicized the latter. Jacob’s innovation came out of the rising prominence of reproduction in neo-Darwinist studies of populations and in his own field, the cellular genetics of bacteria and their viruses, and engagement with history and philosophy of science. The discovery of bacterial “sex” enabled microbial genetics but, ironically, led Jacob to a sexless concept of reproduction. This approach molded a history that reached across the living world but slighted sex and the complexities of reproduction in multicellular organisms. Readers can learn from its strength and limitations. (shrink)

La correspondance latine échangée entre Leibniz et Tun de ses maîtres, Jacob Thomasius, professeur de philosophie morale, puis de dialectique et d'éloquence à l'Université de Leipzig, figure dans l'Akademie-Ausgabe des œuvres de Leibniz. Richard Bodéüs nous en donne ici la premiére traduction intégrate en français, assortie d'analyses: celles-ci figurent dans I'introduction, dans les notes qui accompagnent le texte, et dans les commentaires qui suivent chaque piéce de la correspondance.

Given his influence on a broad cohort of prominent theorists in the latter half of the twentieth century – among them Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, François Laruelle, Gilles Châtelet, Albert To...

Given his influence on a broad cohort of prominent theorists in the latter half of the twentieth century – among them Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler, François Laruelle, Gilles Châtelet, Albert To...

In the last two decades, the philosophy of criminal law has undergone a vibrant revival in Canada. The adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms has given the Supreme Court of Canada unprecedented latitude to engage with principles of legal, moral, and political philosophy when elaborating its criminal law jurisprudence. Canadian scholars have followed suit by paying increased attention to the philosophical foundations of domestic criminal law. Because of Canada's leadership in international criminal law, both at the level of (...) the International Criminal Court and of specific war crimes tribunals, they have also begun to turn their attention to international criminal law per se. This collection seeks to bring all these Canadian voices together for the first time, and evidence the fact that criminal law theory is no longer to be associated exclusively with the older British, German and American traditions. The topics covered include questions of philosophical methodology, the legitimate scope of domestic and international criminalization, rationales for criminal law defences in both domestic and international law, the philosophical underpinnings of specific crimes and forms of joint responsibility, as well as the theorization of criminal procedure and evidence law. ENDORSEMENTS "In continental Europe, academic commentary on the criminal law has long manifested large philosophical ambitions. Less so in common-law countries, where the dominance of jury trial and the piecemeal development of case-law, together with the famously robust attitudes of common lawyers, have militated against detailed philosophical engagement with doctrine. Over the last 20 years or so, however, new generations of philosophically-literate lawyers and legally-informed philosophers have overcome the historic resistance. Nowhere more so, it seems, than in Canada, where the common law and civilian traditions meet. In 'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory', François Tanguay-Renaud and James Stribopoulos have joined with 14 talented Canadian colleagues to showcase the tremendous breadth and depth of their contemporary national contribution to the subject. Ranging across topics as diverse as emergency, obscenity, and insanity, these essays - without exception insightful and penetrating -set a high standard for the rest of us to aspire to.'' John Gardner, University of Oxford "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory' is an excellent collection of essays demonstrating the vigour, creativity and range of Canadian criminal justice scholarship. It covers a wide range of problems and issues both in the domestic and the international context. Core questions are examined in depth and new questions are brought to the fore. I recommend it very highly to criminal lawyers and philosophers of the criminal law." Professor Victor Tadros, University of Warwick "'Rethinking Criminal Law Theory 'is packed with outstanding contributions from criminal law theorists who are among the best not only in Canada, but in the whole English-speaking world. Broad and deep in its coverage, the collection offers fresh approaches to a wide range of cutting-edge issues in the field. It provides a resource readers will come back to repeatedly." Stuart Green, Professor of Law and Justice Nathan L Jacobs Scholar, Rutgers University. (shrink)

Recueil de contributions sur la connaissance du monde par Dieu et sur le statut des vérités objectives de la science montrant la diversité des approches proposées par des philosophes tels que Thomas d'Aquin, Duns Scot, Guillaume d'Ockham, François de Meyronnes, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Bayle...

Recueil de contributions sur la connaissance du monde par Dieu et sur le statut des vérités objectives de la science montrant la diversité des approches proposées par des philosophes tels que Thomas d'Aquin, Duns Scot, Guillaume d'Ockham, François de Meyronnes, Nicolas Malebranche, Pierre Bayle...

Dominique Janicaud, qui nous a quittés brutalement en août 2002, à la veille de son départ à la retraite, était né le 14 novembre 1937 à Paris. Élève d’André Jacob en Terminale, puis de Jean Brun en khâgne au lycée Lakanal, il entre à l’ENS de la rue d’Ulm en 1958. Agrégé de philosophie en 1961, il est professeur à l’ENI de Caen et à l’École militaire de Saint-Cyr..

What is at stake for Jacob Klein in François Vieta’s analytical art is the birth of both the “modern concept of ‘number’ [Zahl], as it underlies symbolic calculi” and the expanded, in contrast to ancient Greek science, scope of the generality of mathematical science itself. Of the former, Klein writes that it “heralds a general conceptual transformation which extends over the whole of modern science”. The latter, he says, lends the “treatment” [πραγματεία] at issue in the ancient Greek mathematical (...) idea of a “‘general treatment’ [καθόλου πραγματεία]” “a completely new sense” “within the system of ‘science.’” The generality of this new sense will concern both the method and object of science in what will come to be known as universal mathematics. This transformation of the basic concept and scope, initially of mathematics and then of “the system of knowledge in general”, “concerns first and foremost the concept of ἀριθμόσ itself”. As a result of “its transfer into a new conceptual dimension” —i.e., into the dimension in which both “the concept of ‘number’ [Zahl]... is itself... as is that which it means” “symbolic in nature”—a transfer that “becomes visible” “for the first time in Vieta’s ‘general analytic,’” there follows “a thoroughgoing modification of the means and aims of science.” Klein maintains that what this modification involves is “best characterized by a phrase... in which Vieta expresses the ultimate problem, the problem proper, of his ‘analytical art’: ‘Analytical art appropriates to itself by right the proud problem of problems, which is: TO LEAVE NO PROBLEM UNSOLVED’.”. (shrink)

The French molecular biologist François Jacob outlined a theory of evolution as tinkering. From a methodological point of view, his approach can be seen as a biologic specification of the relation between laws, describing coherently the dynamics of a system, and contingent boundary conditions on this dynamics. From a semiotic perspective, tinkering is a pragmatic concept well-known from the information-theoretic anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In idealized contrast to an engineer, the tinkerer has to accept the concrete restrictions on his (...) material resources as only gradually changeable constraints on his projects. Jacobian biopragmatics examines evolution as a biologic analogue to human tinkering devoid of any projecting subjectivity. To validate this analogy, four basic principles concerning main formal aspects of evolutionary objects, agents, histories, and consistency criteria are proposed. (shrink)

François Jacob’s The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity has shown an enduring relevance for the history and philosophy of biology. In this article, resisting the received view that regards this book merely as an application of Foucault’s archaeological method, I reconstruct a silent debate between François Jacob and Jacques Monod. More precisely, I argue that Jacob’s history of biology offers a riposte to Monod’s claims in Chance and Necessity. First, I show that the distinction between (...) a “history of ideas” and a “history of objects” captures two ways of looking at the history of science that characterize Monod’s and Jacob’s own approaches. Next, I present Monod’s search for a “theory of the natural selection of ideas.” Then I argue that the concept of “integron,” introduced by Jacob in his conclusion, covertly undermines Monod’s argument for the use of evolutionary models of cultural and scientific change. These contrasting perspectives shed new light on why the Nobel colaureates and former colleagues expressed little interest in each other’s books. More generally, the Monod-Jacob divide illustrates the use and rejection of biological models in writing the history of science and the importance of situating Jacob within his own milieu. (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)

Explores the sublime as an unmasterable excess of beauty that marks the limit of representation, in language that requires a firm grasp on the concepts and terminology of modern (that is, pre-postmodern) philosophy.

La publication presque simultanée de L'Ordre biologique d'André Lwoff (1969), de La Logique du vivant de François Jacob (1970), du Hasard et la nécessité de Jacques Monod (1970) et les débats qui s'ensuivirent, ont constitué un moment fort de la vie intellectuelle française. Comme il serait difficile aujourd'hui d'imaginer des débats analogues, réunissant philosophes et scientifiques autour de questions aussi fondamentales que la nature de l'objectivité scientifique et l'explication des phénomènes vivants! Le contexte scientifique et culturel explique la genèse (...) de ces trois ouvrages et les réactions qui suivirent leur publication. Dès 1971, un bel article de Georges Canguilhem en soulignait les convergences. Ce livre montre qu'ils sont le fruit des avancées rapides survenues dans la description moléculaire des organismes vivants. L'impact de ces découvertes est d'autant plus important en France que les transformations précédentes des sciences du vivant, l'essor de la génétique et de la synthèse moderne dans les années1930 - nouvelle version de la théorie de l'évolution -, y étaient passées inaperçues. Ce recueil vise à rappeler, mais surtout à faire mieux comprendre, ce moment si riche - avec l'espoir secret d'y trouver des recettes pour réanimer une vie intellectuelle devenue aujourd'hui bien fade. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Social Cartesianism: François Poulain de la Barre and the Origins of the EnlightenmentSiep StuurmanMore than sixty years ago Paul Hazard demonstrated that the major ideas usually associated with the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment were voiced as early as the 1680s. 1 Hazard situated Cartesianism squarely at the origins of his story: Descartes himself may have wanted to remain a moderate in political and religious matters, but his followers behaved like (...) the proverbial apprentis sorciers, stopping at nothing and criticizing everything under the sky. 2 Reviewing Hazard’s argument after half a century, Margaret Jacob warns against an interpretation of Cartesianism that sees it solely as an oppositional movement. In the French situation, Cartesianism also “provided arguments for absolutism as well as for the domination over society by those... groups capable of mastering the new science.” 3 Cartesianism thus appears as a Janus-faced phenomenon that contained the germs of both an emergent “rational absolutism” and an iconoclastic critique of established authority.The chief interest of the first generation of Cartesian philosophers who published their work in the 1660s and 1670s was with natural science, and when drawn into the ideological minefield of theology, they usually bent over backwards to deny any and all materialist implications of their philosophy. Generally, they were inclined to keep aloof from social and political matters. There were, however, exceptions. The most conspicuous of these was François Poulain de la Barre who is hardly ever mentioned today outside the historiography [End Page 617] of early-modern feminism. 4 In the 1670s Poulain published three egalitarian-feminist treatises which must be considered the first examples of a self-conscious Cartesian social philosophy. The three books went to the press in an impressive staccato 5 : De l’Egalité des deux Sexes. Discours Physique et Moral, où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des Préjugez (Paris, 1673); De l’Education des Dames pour la Conduite de l’Esprit dans les Sciences et dans les Moeurs. Entretiens (Paris, 1674); and De l’Excellence des Hommes contre l’Egalité des Sexes (Paris, 1675). 6In these texts, produced in a few years of frenzied intellectual activity, Poulain presents the case for the equality of the sexes in all fields of social life, from intellectual pursuits to military skills. Of the three the first is a systematic treatise, the second a dialogue, and the third a polemical tract in which Poulain first attempts to show that the Christian tradition is on his side, then “refutes” himself, and finally demolishes his own refutation, thus returning to his original argument. These writings are organized around his feminist program, but even a cursory reading of his books makes clear that his philosophical ambitions went beyond the issue of gender as such. Poulain himself states that he is going to attack male supremacy because it is the most deeply ingrained prejudice of all: if that can be subverted, all other prejudices will in due course follow suit. 7Poulain’s egalitarian philosophy was actually the first sustained attempt to apply Cartesian reasoning to the analysis of society, authority, and power. Previous treatments of Poulain’s thought have chiefly centered on his feminism, but the other aspects of his philosophy have received far less attention. Furthermore, Poulain has generally been portrayed as a lone radical, and the intellectual origins of his thought have so far escaped systematic investigation. 8 [End Page 618]Poulain’s writings are best seen as an attempt to construct an overall egalitarian view of society, which I shall call social Cartesianism. His critique of masculine rule widens out into an attack on unjustified power in other domains, such as race and rank. Poulain mounts an epistemological attack on traditional authority in all fields of human activity and even formulates a first, tentative conception of social change, taking issue with the alleged fixity of the concept of “nature” in the theory of modern natural law. Moreover, his thought almost literally prefigures themes and theses habitually associated with the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. In the historiography of Cartesianism and the early Enlightenment, however, we find him scarcely mentioned, still less given serious attention. 9In the historiography of... (shrink)

Françios Viète was a geometer in search of better techniques for astronomical calculation. Through his theorem on angular sections he found a use for higher-dimensional geometric magnitudes which allowed him to create an algebra for geometry. We show that unlike traditional numerical algebra, the knowns and unknowns in Viète’s logistice speciosa are the relative sizes of non-arithmetized magnitudes in which the “calculations” must respect dimension. Along with this foundational shift Viète adopted a radically new notation based in Greek geometric equalities. (...) His letters stand for values rather than types, and his given values are undetermined. Where previously algebra was founded in polynomials as aggregations, Viète became the first modern algebraist in working with polynomials built from operations, and the notations reflect these conceptions. Viète’s innovations are situated in the context of sixteenth-century practice, and we examine the interpretation of Jacob Klein, the only historian to have conducted a serious inquiry into the ontology of Viète’s “species”. (shrink)

In Of Grammatology, Derrida discusses Leroi-Gourhan in relating différance to memory, the ‘program’, and the history of life. In Technics and Time, 1, Stiegler argues that Derrida failed to draw all the philosophical implications of linking différance to the questions of life and retention. Derrida returned to the life sciences in 1975, in a seminar not published in its entirety until 2019. There, Derrida attempts to deconstruct the geneticist François Jacob's account of the ‘logic of life’, but Derrida's analysis (...) of different kinds of memory and programs seems confused, suggesting that the Derridean text remains haunted by the deficiencies of his earlier reading of Leroi-Gourhan. Later in the seminar, Derrida shows foresight concerning the problems arising from seeing the genetic molecule as akin to a computer program, despite Jacob making this link via Schrödinger and Wiener's discussions of negentropy. When Derrida turns to a reading of Freud and libidinal energy, however, he ‘assumes’ a reading of Laplanche but ignores the latter's critique of Freud's own preoccupations with the second law of thermodynamics. The limitations of Derrida's attempts to bring deconstruction together with scientific understanding expose the need for the kind of ‘organological’ and ‘neganthropological’ approach that Stiegler will ultimately pursue. (shrink)

François Jacob, biologiste français et Prix Nobel, a souligné dans les années 1970 que les sciences, les technologies et leur cortège expérimental font intervenir " un jeu des possibles " et constituent pour cette raison " une machine à fabriquer de l'avenir ". Autrement dit, les activités scientifiques, médicales ou encore artistiques exigent que soient instaurés des dispositifs qui à la fois concrétisent et contrôlent la génération de connaissances nouvelles et de pratiques originales. Ce livre vise à explorer les (...) articulations multiples entre les activités créatives et leurs limites constitutives. Les articles posent la question des limites de la créativité à partir de perspectives philosophiques et sociologiques tout en se référant à des études de cas qui sont à l'interface entre sciences, arts et normes sociotechniques. Le livre est le résultat d'une recherche sur la créativité menée à l'IRIST (Institut de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Sciences et la Technologie) à l'Université de Strasbourg. (shrink)

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do (...) transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects. (shrink)

Ludwik Fleck, Edmund Husserl : on the historicity of scientific knowledge -- Gaston Bachelard : the concept of "phenomenotechnique" -- Georges Canguilhem : epistemological history -- Pisum : Carl Correns's experiments on Xenia, 1896-99 -- Eudorina : Max Hartmann's experiments on biological regulation in protozoa, 1914-21 -- Ephestia : Alfred Kähn's experimental design for a developmental physiological -- Genetics, 1924-45 -- Tobacco mosaic virus : virus research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes for Biochemistry and Biology, 1937-45 -- The concept of (...) the gene : molecular biological perspectives -- The liquid scintillation counter : traces of radioactivity -- The concept of information : the writings of François Jacob -- Intersections -- Preparations -- The economy of the scribble. (shrink)

One of Jacques Derrida’s richest and most provocative works, Life Death challenges and deconstructs one of the most deeply rooted dichotomies of Western thought: life and death. Here Derrida rethinks the traditional philosophical understanding of the relationship between life and death, undertaking multidisciplinary analyses of a range of topics, including philosophy, linguistics, and the life sciences. In seeking to understand the relationship between life and death, he engages in close readings of Freudian psychoanalysis, the philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger, French (...) geneticist François Jacob, and epistemologist Georges Canguilhem. Derrida gave his “Life Death” seminar over fourteen sessions between 1975 and 1976 at the École normale supérieure in Paris as part of the preparation for students studying for the agrégation, a notoriously competitive qualifying exam. The theme for the exam that year was “Life and Death,” but Derrida made a critical modification to the title by dropping the coordinating conjunction. The resulting title of Life Death poses a philosophical question about the close relationship between life and death. Derrida argues that death must be considered neither as the opposite of life nor as the truth or fulfillment of it, but rather as that which both limits life and makes it possible. Through these captivating sessions, Derrida thus not only questions traditional understandings of the relationship between life and death, but also ultimately develops a new way of thinking about what he calls “life death.”. (shrink)

How and why, historian of science Lily Kay asks, did the ‘biological problem of DNA-based protein synthesis’ come to be represented ‘as an information code and a writing technology?’ What sort of metaphor was ‘code’ for these bio-geneticists? One whose run-away expansion, Derrida noted in Of Grammatology (1967), urgently required philosophical justification. Yet, 60 years later, there is still fundamental disagreement about its meaning and epistemic status. If the metaphor lacks ontological purchase, what accounts for its effectiveness? If, on the (...) other hand, scriptural metaphors get at the common root of culture and biology, what do we now mean by ‘code’? In this article, I trace several influential accounts of the metaphor’s effectiveness—making explicit the opposing notions of ‘code’ that animate them—and argue that each is too limited. Greater attention to the metaphoricity of ‘code’ yields a more philosophically productive and critical account of the metaphor of code. (shrink)

Why was the road to EMBL 'more difficult than anticipated', as Francois Jacob put it? The standard account, advanced by scientists, is that it was because molecular biology did not require big, complex and expensive equipment like high-energy physics. European governments therefore lacked the incentive to pool their efforts and to build together a supranational laboratory 'modeled on CERN'. This account is one-sided. It overlooks the fact that many scientists themselves were less than enthusiastic about building a European (...) molecular biology laboratory in the early 1960s. Taking John Kendrew and Conrad Waddington as representative of two different and opposing views on how best to promote molecular biology in Europe at this time, I argue that a supranational laboratory project could only come to fruition once the field had been entrenched in national institutional niches (or after determined efforts to do so had failed). Until that time, the usual fear that a European laboratory would drain essential human and financial resources away from incipient or planned programmes in universities and national research centres dominated the horizons of most molecular biologists in Europe. Hence their preference to first establish EMBO to coordinate existing activities and only later to set up a supranational laboratory. (shrink)

Many historical studies have been devoted to the French school of molecular biology, in particular to the work of Jacques Monod on adaptive enzymes. By focusing on Francois Jacob's studies on lysogeny between 1950 and 1960, we intend to redress the imbalance of historiography, as well as proposing a more fruitful point of view for understanding the relative importance of international contacts and local traditions in the genesis of the operon model.Elie Wollman and Jacob's work on temperate (...) bacteriophages rendered respectable a system that had been considered an artefact for more than two decades. They did this firstly by modelling their studies on those of the US phage group and secondly by basing these studies on a complex vision of the relations between bacteria and bacteriophages. The interaction between bacteria and temperate bacteriophages was considered ab initio as a biochemical process, the mechanisms of which would eventually be characterized. It was also considered as a ''normal'' phenomenon that could be used as a model to understand the process of differentiation, as well as the role of viruses in diseases and cancer. The temperate bacteriophage was a model system that was far more epistemologically open and, for this reason, in a sense more productive than the virulent phage studied by the US phage group. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: GEORGES CANGUILHEM’S BIOPHILOSOPHY The eminent French biologist and historian of biology, François Jacob, once notoriously declared «On n’interroge plus la vie dans les laboratoires»: laboratory research no longer inquires into the notion of “Life”. Certain influential French philosophers of science of the mid‐century such as Georges Canguilhem would disagree, or at least seek to resist some of Jacob’s diagnosis. Not by imposing a different kind of research program in laboratories, but by an unusual combination of historical and (...) philosophical inquiry into the foundations of the life sciences. Canguilhem speaks of «defending vitalist biology» and declares that Life cannot be grasped by logic. Is this history and philosophy of biology? Is it vitalism? It definitely is a different project from current philosophy of biology. One short‐lived term for it was “biophilosophy”. In this paper I explore the content of this term as it relates to the above questions. (shrink)