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We can calculate financial fraud, but how do we measure bad faith?
How can we evaluate the words of the pharmaceutical industry or of
eco-scientific ideologies, or the subtle deception found in
political scheming? Henri Atlan sheds light on these questions
through the concept of "ona'ah," which in Hebrew refers to both
fraud in financial transactions and the verbal injury inflicted by
speech. The world of "ona'ah" is a world of an "in-between," where
the impossible purity of absolute Platonic truth gives way to a
more relative notion--the near-theft, the quasi-lie. Today it seems
that no discourse is safe from fraudulent excesses, be they
intentional or no. As both philosopher and biologist, Atlan works
on several registers. He forges links between the Talmud, the
Kabbalah, and the big questions of our time, multiplying the
bridges between science, philosophy, and current ethical dilemmas.
In a context of financial and moral crises that appear to be
weakening our democracies, Henri Atlan's work allows us to rethink
the status of fraud in the contemporary world.
In this second volume of "The Sparks of Randomness," Henri Atlan
pursues his investigation of human life, which he grounds in a
distinctive intermingling of the biological and cognitive sciences
and traditions of Jewish thought. "The Atheism of Scripture" offers
up a paradox: its audacious thesis is that the Word or revealed
scripture can be better understood without God. It must be
decrypted or analyzed atheistically, that is, not as divine
revelation, but in and of itself. The first part of the book
addresses contemporary science. It puts the evolution of ideas
about life and knowledge as conceived by today's biological and
cognitive sciences into perspective and shows how the genealogy of
ethics must be approached in a new way. The second part takes up
this challenge by putting classical philosophy in dialogue with the
Talmud and the Kabbalah to advance a non-dualistic anthropology of
the body and the mind.
The Sparks of Randomness, Henri Atlan's magnum opus, develops his
whole philosophy with a highly impressive display of knowledge,
wisdom, depth, rigor, and intellectual and moral vigor. Atlan
founds an ethics adapted to the new power over life that modern
scientific knowledge has given us. He holds that the results of
science cannot ground any ethical or political truth whatsoever,
while human creative activity and the conquest of knowledge are a
double-edged sword. This first volume, Spermatic Knowledge, begins
with the Talmudic tale about the prophet Jeremiah's creation of a
golem, or artificial man. Atlan shows that the Jewish tradition
does not demonize man for creating and changing living things-a
charge often leveled at promoters of advanced technologies, like
biologists, who are accused of "playing God." To the contrary, man
is depicted as being the co-creator of the world. Although Atlan
believes that the fabrication of life "from scratch" will take
place in the near future, he posits that this achievement will not
really amount to creating life current biology and biotechnologies
have demonstrated that there is no absolute distinction between
life and non-life, no critical threshold whose crossing would be
taboo. He also debunks and demystifies our belief in free will and
our conviction, of theological origin, that there would be no
possibility for ethics if free will were shown to be an illusion.
Throughout, he combines science, religion, and ancient and modern
philosophy in unexpected and inspired ways. His radical,
uncompromising Spinozism allows him to propose a complete revision
of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, while showing that
their current impasses stem from remnants of traditional dualism.
From his brilliant reflections on time, he also derives exciting
considerations for medicine and epidemiology.
For a long time, immunology has been dominated by the idea of a
simple linear cause-effect relationship between the exposure to an
antigen and the production of specific antibodies against that
antigen. Clonal selection was the name of the theory based on this
idea and it has provided the main concepts to account for the known
features of the immune response. More recently, immunologists have
discovered a wealth of new facts, in the form of different
regulatory cells (helpers, suppressors, antigen presenting cells),
genetic determinations of immune responses such as those involved
in graft re jections, different molecular structures responsible
for intercellular interactions such as interleukins, cytokins,
idiotype-antiidiotype recognition and others. While furthering our
understanding of the local interactions (molecular and cellular) in
volved in the immune response, these discoveries have led to a
questioning of the simplicities of the classical clonal selection
theory. It is clear today that every single immune response is a
cooperative phenomenon involving several different molecular and
cellular interactions taking place in a coupled manner. In
addition, cross reactivity to different antigens has shown that
responses of the whole im mune system to different antigens are not
completely isolated from one another and that the history of
encounters with different antigens plays a crucial role in the
maturation of the whole system. Thus, problems of complexity,
generation of di versity and self-organization have entered the
field of immunology.
We can calculate financial fraud, but how do we measure bad faith?
How can we evaluate the words of the pharmaceutical industry or of
eco-scientific ideologies, or the subtle deception found in
political scheming? Henri Atlan sheds light on these questions
through the concept of "ona'ah," which in Hebrew refers to both
fraud in financial transactions and the verbal injury inflicted by
speech. The world of "ona'ah" is a world of an "in-between," where
the impossible purity of absolute Platonic truth gives way to a
more relative notion--the near-theft, the quasi-lie. Today it seems
that no discourse is safe from fraudulent excesses, be they
intentional or no. As both philosopher and biologist, Atlan works
on several registers. He forges links between the Talmud, the
Kabbalah, and the big questions of our time, multiplying the
bridges between science, philosophy, and current ethical dilemmas.
In a context of financial and moral crises that appear to be
weakening our democracies, Henri Atlan's work allows us to rethink
the status of fraud in the contemporary world.
In this second volume of "The Sparks of Randomness," Henri Atlan
pursues his investigation of human life, which he grounds in a
distinctive intermingling of the biological and cognitive sciences
and traditions of Jewish thought. "The Atheism of Scripture" offers
up a paradox: its audacious thesis is that the Word or revealed
scripture can be better understood without God. It must be
decrypted or analyzed atheistically, that is, not as divine
revelation, but in and of itself. The first part of the book
addresses contemporary science. It puts the evolution of ideas
about life and knowledge as conceived by today's biological and
cognitive sciences into perspective and shows how the genealogy of
ethics must be approached in a new way. The second part takes up
this challenge by putting classical philosophy in dialogue with the
Talmud and the Kabbalah to advance a non-dualistic anthropology of
the body and the mind.
"The Sparks of Randomness," Henri Atlan's magnum opus, develops his
whole philosophy with a highly impressive display of knowledge,
wisdom, depth, rigor, and intellectual and moral vigor. Atlan
founds an ethics adapted to the new power over life that modern
scientific knowledge has given us. He holds that the "results" of
science cannot ground any ethical or political truth whatsoever,
while human creative activity and the conquest of knowledge are a
double-edged sword. This first volume, "Spermatic Knowledge,"
begins with the Talmudic tale about the prophet Jeremiah's creation
of a golem, or artificial man. Atlan shows that the Jewish
tradition does not demonize man for creating and changing living
things--a charge often leveled at promoters of advanced
technologies, like biologists, who are accused of "playing God." To
the contrary, man is depicted as being the co-creator of the world.
Although Atlan believes that the fabrication of life "from scratch"
will take place in the near future, he posits that this achievement
will not really amount to "creating life" current biology and
biotechnologies have demonstrated that there is no absolute
distinction between life and non-life, no critical threshold whose
crossing would be taboo. He also debunks and demystifies our belief
in free will and our conviction, of theological origin, that there
would be no possibility for ethics if free will were shown to be an
illusion. Throughout, he combines science, religion, and ancient
and modern philosophy in unexpected and inspired ways. His radical,
uncompromising Spinozism allows him to propose a complete revision
of cognitive science and philosophy of mind, while showing that
their current impasses stem from remnants of traditional dualism.
From his brilliant reflections on time, he also derives exciting
considerations for medicine and epidemiology.
Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization
and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has
during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary
European philosophical and bioethical debates. In a massive oeuvre
that ranges from biology and neural network theory to Spinoza's
thought and the history of philosophy, and from artificial
intelligence and information theory to Jewish mysticism and
contemporary medical ethics, Atlan has come to offer an
exceptionally powerful philosophical argumentation that is as
hostile to scientism as it is attentive to biology's conceptual and
experimental rigor, as careful with concepts of rationality as it
is committed to rethinking the human place in a radically
determined yet forever changing world. This is the first volume to
bring together the major strands of Atlan's work for an
English-language audience. It is an indispensable compendium for
those seeking to clarify the joint stakes and shared import of
philosophy and science for questions of life and the living-today
and tomorrow.
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