Anne Fagot-Largeault

In collaboration with the radio des cinq académies de l’Institut de France (Canal Académie)

The Speaker

Anne Fagot-Largeault, MD, PhD in human sciences is a professor at the Collège de France (Chair of philosophy of biological and medical sciences) and is a member of the Academy of Sciences of the Institut de France.

From 1978 to 2003, she was a specialist with the health and social services administration in Paris and taught philosophy of science at several of Paris’s regional universities, including Paris XII, Paris X, and Paris I.

Anne Fagot-Largeault’s work deals primarily with the themes of history and the philosophy of life sciences, as studied from theoretical (epistemology and biological ontology) and practical (the study of ethics) viewpoints.

Her research on the logic of medical reasoning developed thanks to the program on the logic and philosophy of science at Stanford University and to her successful work in the areas of clinical research and epidemiology. In basing her work on ethics on clinical tests conducted on patients with AIDS and cancer, she was able to deepen her understanding of the question. This work was done from 1990 to 1998 through various research committees and through the support of the National Consulting Committee on Ethics for life sciences and health.

In addition to numerous articles, she has published the following titles in French: Médecine et probabilités [Medicine and Probabilities](Didier Scholarly, 1982); L'homme bio-éthique [Bio-Ethical Man]: Pour une déontologie de la recherche sur le vivant [Toward a Professional Set of Ethics for Research on Living Organisms](published by Maloine in 1985); Les causes de la mort. Histoire naturelle et facteurs de risque [Causes of Death: Natural History and Risk Factors](Vrin, 1989); Respect du patrimoine génétique et respect de la personne [Respect for Genetic Patrimony](published by the Swiss Society of Bio-Ethics, 1991). With D. Andler and B. Saint-Sernin, she co-authored Philosophie des sciences [The Philosophy of Sciences](Gallimard, 2002), and, in English, along with Shahid Rahman and Juan Manuel, The Influence of Genetics on Contemporary Thinking (Springer, 2007).

Lectures

Human Stem Cells: Philosophy, Ethics and Society
“Evolution may have eliminated the ability to regenerate, but it has also left us with the ability to repair.”
Le Douarin, 2007

Anne Fagot-Largeault will first of all sum up the history of human stem cell research and the questions raised regarding their acceptability.  Then, moving toward a more general view of the question, she will highlight the mind-boggling variety of political differences at play in terms of stem cell regulation. She will also study the different research strategies on human stem cells (surplus embryos, nucleus transfer, hybrids and cybrids and iPS cells,) as well as medical practices and the societal questions that derive from them.
The answers to these questions depend upon our ability to guarantee  fair distribution of research and regenerative therapy. Otherwise, we risk a situation where such care is prohibitively expensive and becomes health care benefitting only the few with the means to pay.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Science and Philosophy

“Science without philosophy literally cannot know what it’s talking about. A Philosophy without methodological exploration of the phenomena leads only to formal truths, that is to say, errors.”

This statement, from Sens et non-sens [Sense and Nonsense]by Merleau-Ponty, was greatly influenced by the European movement of ideas known as “phenomenological anthropology”.

In spite of the turmoil in Europe after World War II, Merleau-Ponty was quickly read and adopted by the intellectual community, which had been trying to study human and animal behavior since the 1920’s, in hopes of identifying “a way of being that scientism had ignored” (from ‘Le métaphysique dans l’homme’, Sens et non-sens [The Metaphysical in Man, Sense and Nonsense]). In other words, Merleau-Ponty is considered by scientists as the philosopher who understood and legitimized a new way of conducting scientific research.
Anne Fagot-Largeaulty will try to clarify the relationship between philosophical research and scientific research, which played a role in the imperfect dialogues between the French philosopher and scholars who accepted him as one of them.

Chair in philosophy of biological and medical sciences’ website:
http://www.college-de-france.fr/default/EN/all/phi_sci/index.htm

 Link to an interview of Anne Fagot-Largeault on the radio des cinq académies de l’Institut de France (Canal Académie):
http://www.canalacademie.com/Anne-Fagot-Largeault.html

Link to a lecture of Anne Fagot-Largeault (Université de Tous les Savoirs (UTLS)) :
http://www.lemonde.fr/savoirs-et-connaissances/article/2002/07/03/anne-fagot-largeault-diversite-humaine-et-qualite-de-vie_283519_3328.html
http://www.canalu.tv/content/view/videos/76700

Express your interest in this lecture - Online Forms
Express your interest in this lecture - Download Paper Forms