Agenda UV

The López Piñero Institute for the History of Medicine and Science (joint centre of the CSIC and the University of Valencia), located in the Palau de Cerveró, presents the conference Science, complexity and dialectics, the 3 February, at 17:00, in the aforementioned Institute. The conference, which will be entirely held in English, will be taught by Janine Guespin-Michel, full university professor in microbiology at the Université de Rouen and former student of École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres. The presentation of the activity will be provided by Julián Marcelo, former research director of the Department of Business Organisation (Universitat Politècnica de València).

New scientific paradigms, known as complex systems sciences, are currently arising in all disciplines, from natural sciences to human and social sciences. They leave the domain of linearity and strict determinism, and require multiple and multidisciplinary approaches. Often, they also escape from the rules of formal logic. Their development collides with not only epistemological obstacles, but also economic and ideological. Dialectical logic cannot prescribe or predict, but can it be useful for thinking? Can it enrich the scientific insight towards the new questions posed by the complex? Can it allow the complex to exceed the sterilising opposition between the opposite attitudes (reductionism or holism) that have remained throughout the history of science? Would it be the rationality that the twenty-first century requires, the thinking of the complex established within the dialectical logic?

Janine Guespin-Michel, emeritus full university professor in microbiology at the Université de Rouen and former student of École Normale Supérieure de Sèvres, began her research on bacterial genetics in the Institute Pasteur and in the Faculty of Sciences in Orsay. After this, she has managed both laboratories of basic and applied microbiology at the Université de Technologie Compiègne and the Université de Rouen. After her retirement she has taken the time to get started in the dynamics of non-linear systems and interdisciplinary work with physicists, computer scientists and philosophers, especially in the frame of the Genepole (or Genetic Pole) Epigenomics workshop in Evry. Author (or co-author) of books in her field Procaryotic genetics: genome organisation, transfer and plasticity (Ed.Blackwell Science, 1991) Las bactéries, leur monde et nous (Ed.Dunod, 2011), Janine is also the author-coordinator of collective works Émergence, complexité et dialectique (Odile Jacob Ed. 2005); Le vivant entre science et marché: une démocratie à inventer (Syllepse/espaces Marx Ed. 2006); and La science pour qui? (Éd.du croquant, 2013).