Pierre-Yves Fioraso

Biography:

Pierre-Yves has been studying Philosophy since 1994 and received his diploma, primary degree and masters in Philosophy from the University of Paris X, Nanterre, France. His M.A Thesis was entitled: “Desire and Law in the Writings of Kafka”. He spent a year as an exchange student in University College Cork in 2002/3 and the following year completed his M.Litt. in Philosophy, for which his thesis was entitled “The Ontological Signification of Biopolitics in the work of Giorgio Agamben”. He spent the year 2005/6 as an exchange student in University College Riverside, California and at present he is completing the final year of his PhD at NUI Galway for which his thesis is entitled: “Pathology and Death in the Phenomenon of Life”.

Current Research:

Pathology and Death in the Phenomenon of Life (Towards an epistemology of complexity)

In spite of their theoretical differences, Claude Bernard, Henri Bergson and Georges Canguilhem all have one thing in common; life is essentially a creative process. In this light the attempt to understand the living being raises the fundamental difficulty of trying to grasp an object that is constantly “on its way”, an object that has no state except a state of passage. Accordingly to the creative nature of life, the living being does not form an object in the simple sense. As opposed to an object understood as a total synthesis of parts, or an object as part of a superior totality, we will attempt to define the living being as a complex object which does not presuppose simplicity as an explicative principle. This thesis will defend the consequential necessity of a cross-disciplinary approach to the complex nature of life which could successfully allow the possibility of overcoming the resistance that the complexity of life presents for analysis and conceptualization. For Claude Bernard, Bergson and Canguilhem the notion of life is not a concept. Traditionally, vitalism has been the depositary of such a resistance, although it remains outside of science. On the contrary, cross-disciplinarity implies a conversion of view and conceptualization within science. From this view the choice of pathology and death as the main themes of this thesis are not surprising. Disease and dying are equally recognized as fundamental possibilities of the living being and also what science, to some degree, aims to free itself from. In the perspective of this work, disease and death are the two essential components of the construction of complexity of the phenomenon of life. The important works of Canguilhem in the epistemology of biology and above all the work of Ameisen on cell suicide are the main references for developing a cross-disciplinary epistemology of complexity. By looking at the importance of programmed cell death in the construction of organisms and its link to cancer, a general tendency of a progressive internalization of cause can be observed in pathology and death. In summary the work of this thesis will attempt to develop, in light of the notion of complexity, the relation between the tendency of the ’internalisation’ of pathology and death with the possibility of cross-disciplinarity as an epistemological condition of biological science.

Contact:

Postgraduate Room, Millennium Building, E-mail: py303hotmail.com

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