Inbunden, Engelska, 2027

Immunity and the Constitution of Identity

A Philosophical Account

Av Bartlomiej Swiatczak, Alfred I. Tauber

1388 kr

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Beskrivning

Immunity and the Constitution of Identity offers a philosophical account of immunology as a science of biological identity. For much of the twentieth century the field rested on the self/non-self model introduced by Frank Macfarlane Burnet. This model presents the organism as a bounded and autonomous entity whose immune system defends a fixed inner self against the foreign. Research on the microbiome, pregnancy, cancer, and normal autoimmunity has challenged this picture. These cases show that the immune system tolerates and incorporates foreign elements rather than only rejecting them.The book argues that immune identity is not a property the organism possesses in advance. It emerges through the ongoing developmental, microbial, and ecological relations with its environment. The authors distinguish etiological explanation, which traces the causal sequence of immune responses, from constitutive explanation, which asks what kind of relational whole the immune system is. The distinction supports a processual and ecological account of immune cognition and individuality. It shows how immunology informs central questions in the philosophy of biology, including what counts as an organism, how biological boundaries are drawn and maintained, and how living systems process meaning and context.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum: 2027-01-25
Mått: 156 x 235 x undefined mm
Format: Inbunden
Språk: Engelska
Antal sidor: 280
Förlag: OUP USA
ISBN: 9780197804636

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Mer om författaren

Bartlomiej Swiatczak works at the intersection of philosophy and immunology. He is based in the Department of Pathology at the University of Cambridge and previously taught history of medicine at the University of Science and Technology of China. His research focuses on biological individuality, immune self/non-self theory, and history of immunology. He has published widely in philosophy of biology and immunology, and co-authored the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the philosophy of immunology with Alfred I. Tauber.Alfred I. Tauber is Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine, Emeritus, and Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Boston University. He served as Chief of the Hematology-Oncology Division at Boston City Hospital and as Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. His laboratory research focused on phagocyte cell biology and the biochemistry of inflammation and informed his later work in the philosophy and history of science. Hiscritical examination of immunology's theory spans its historical origins, Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology (Oxford, 1991), its mid-twentieth-century development in The Generation of Diversity; the conceptual structure of immune theory in The Immune Self, and its contemporary reappraisal in Immunity: The Evolution of an Idea (Oxford, 2017).

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