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Skepticism calls into question the validity of some or all of human knowledge. (The Free Dictionary 2020) It is a thread that goes through many philosophical discussions of epistemology. Moral skepticism holds that there is no knowledge of what is … Read More
The post Ethics in the pandemic appeared first on SetThings.
Biopower is a term coined by Michel Foucault, referring to the practice of modern nation-states by “an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations”. (Foucault 1990, 140) Foucault used the … Read More
The post Biopolitics in the COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on SetThings.
(Cosmology of Sumerian civilization.) Cosmology is the branch of astrophysics that studies the origin, nature, structure and evolution of the Universe. History of scientific cosmologies The scientific cosmology established at any given time depends directly on what we know about … Read More
Viruses coexist for approx. 300 million years with humans. Sometimes viruses can infect people on a large scale. But how was the current pandemic possible? Isolations and quarantines caused by the pandemic, by reducing daily and industrial activities, including tourism, … Read More
The post Social Dimensions of Pandemics appeared first on SetThings.
(The philosopher in the book of estates from 1568) The philosophy of the Renaissance and Humanism as an epoch (approx. before 1400 to after 1600) is a section of the history of philosophy that can be viewed as a transition from the philosophy of the Middle … Read More
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The study of viruses raises pressing conceptual and philosophical questions about their nature, their classification, (O’Malley 2014, 45–94) (Mayr 1953) and their place within the biological world. A major set of problems concerns the individuality and diachronic identity of a … Read More
The post Virus Ontology: Thing, Being, Process, or Information? appeared first on SetThings.
At the beginning of the crisis, the international media called China’s strategy to combat coronavirus “tough”, “extreme”, “severe” and “controversial”, stressing that it offered “no guarantee of success”. (Qin, Myers, and Yu 2020) After the difficult experiences that other countries … Read More
The post Life and death in a pandemic appeared first on SetThings.
Throughout human history, there have been a number of pandemics. The most devastating pandemic was the plague known as the Black Death, which killed about 200 million people in the 14th century, (Philipkoski 2015) and the 1918 flu pandemic (Spanish … Read More
The post Philosophical aspects of pandemics appeared first on SetThings.
Viruses reproduce only inside the living cells of organisms, (Wu 2020) being known so far more than 6,000 species of viruses. (International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) 2020) When it infects a cell, the viruses force it to rapidly … Read More
The post What came first: the virus or the cell? appeared first on SetThings.
Falsifiability (also referred to as the use of refutability) was introduced by Karl Popper and is considered an important concept in epistemology, allowing to draw a line between scientific theories and those that are not. An assertion, a hypothesis, is … Read More
The post Falsifiability appeared first on SetThings.