Thomas Pradeu, "Philosophy of Immunology" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
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What is the philosophical problem behind the concept of immunity?
Welcome to the New Books Network.
Hello and welcome to New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co-host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Alexis McLeod, and Sarah Tyson. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books in a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Thomas Padeux, senior researcher at CNRS, which is the National Center for Scientific Research in France, and the University of Bordeaux. His new book, Philosophy of Immunology, is just out from Cambridge University Press. Vaccines make us wholly or partly immune to disease such as COVID nineteen.
But what is it to be immune? What is an immune system? And what does it do? In its beginnings, immunology was conceived of as the science of the self non self distinction, where the immune system was the self's system of defense against pathogens, the non self elements invading the self. The immune system was also thought to be a very sophisticated system possessed exclusively by vertebrates. In his new book, Prade explains why these traditional conceptions have been upended over the past twenty years or so, and he defends his view of the individual as what he calls an immunologically unified chimera. It is now accepted that even single celled organisms have immune systems, and that those systems are also active in tissue repair and maintenance and the regulation of foreign entities that are not part of the body but are not pathogens either, such as the gut microbiome.
Pradeux also speculates about future directions of immunology with respect to our understanding of psychiatric illness, given new discoveries about the overlap. between the immune system and the nervous system. There's a lot to talk about, so let's get started. Hello, Thomas Pradu. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hello, nice to meet you. Um, so this is I'm very excited to be talking about the philosophy of immunology, which is the title of your book, but also the entire topic. I mean it's the, you know, pandemic in the middle of the pandemic, immune systems and immunology and vaccines and all that is very much on everybody's mind. So uh it's a real pleasure to be able to talk with a leading philosopher of immunology about about the philosophical um
uh implications and issues that arise in immunology. Um before we get to the to the book, um Can you tell us a bit about yourself? I mean, how you came to the philosophical interests you have? and how you came to write this book.
So I've been trained as a very classic uh traditional philosopher and in France uh being trained as a classic philosopher is very classic. So uh uh I went through the Ecole Normale Supérieure and the Paris Sorbon University, so in Paris, and then became an associate professor in philosophy at the Sorbonne. And uh already back then I was interested in biology and even in immunology because my PhD thesis in fact was about uh identity and immunology. So In a nutshell, the idea is that immunology is full of interesting and even fascinating uh philosophical concepts. So that was was what was really the the incentive for me, or really the idea was to try and use my uh philosophical knowledge to better understand why this field was so much.
Uh filled up with uh philosophical notions and philosophical ideas. So that was the initial move. And then uh in 2014 I decided to leave the Sorbonne and to join the CNRS, uh so the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, which is my employer here in France, and I decided to join uh an immunology lab. So now I'm part of uh an immunology lab. So you see. It's even more important for me to connect the philosophy and the immunology, uh given that my daily life is a daily life with immunologists, biologists and medical doctors. And together we try to think about what the immune system is, what it does, and so on and so forth.
That's that's very interesting 'cause a lot of philosophers of science are in, you know, philosophy departments or logic and philosophy of science departments rather than actually directly embedded
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the philosophical problem behind the concept of immunity?
0:00–6:31
2
How did Thomas Pradeu become interested in immunology and philosophy?
6:31–19:15
3
What are the traditional self‑non‑self ideas about the immune system and why have they been challenged?
19:15–38:09
4
How is the immune system distributed across the tree of life, from microbes to vertebrates?
38:09–56:18
5
What are the main components and functions of an immune system in different organisms?
56:18–1:02:39
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from New Books in Philosophy
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