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  • Colonization Resistance and the Gut Microbiota ca 1960-1990: Persistence of an Ecological Paradigm in Medical Microbiology – Nicolas Ramussen (UNSW)

    Carslaw Building Lecture Theatre 275 Carslaw Building (F07), Level 2, Room 275, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: In the 1950s an alarming response to technocratic medicine emerged: patients were suffering severe, often fatal gut infections as a result of antibiotic treatment. This talk describes how in the 1960s-1970s, research into the problem revealed that the indigenous microbial flora of the gut play a major role in protection from disease, and thus established one […]

  • Our Microbial Lives: A Manifesto Against Eradication – Victoria Lee (Ohio University)

    Carslaw Building Lecture Theatre 275 Carslaw Building (F07), Level 2, Room 275, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: There is a growing recognition in the twenty-first century of our dependence on microbes for virtually every aspect of the way we live, including how we grow our food, heal our bodies, and sustain our environment. Yet, microbes are different from other targets of conservation, such as butterflies and elephants: We feel differently about […]

  • Pleonexia and the Public/Private Health Systems – Kathryn MacKay (University of Sydney)

    Carslaw Building Lecture Theatre 275 Carslaw Building (F07), Level 2, Room 275, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: ‘Pleonexia’ is an ancient Greek term that means taking or wanting to take more than is one’s due, or avoiding or wanting to avoid contributing what one justly owes. It is often translated as ‘greed,’ though it is more complex than an idea of greed like uncontrolled appetites, gluttony, or avarice. It is also […]

  • PTSD in Australia from DSM-III to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (2021-2024) – Effie Karageorges (The University of Newcastle)

    Carslaw Building Lecture Theatre 275 Carslaw Building (F07), Level 2, Room 275, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Effie Karageorgos Abstract: In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association published the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III), which introduced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a new psychiatric category applicable to both civilian and veteran trauma. PTSD differed from previous DSM classifications such as ‘gross stress reaction’ in DSM-I of 1952 […]

  • HPS Research Day @ The Sybil Centre

    The Sibyl Centre 15 Carillon Avenue, Newtown, NSW, Australia

    The School of History and Philosophy of Science Researh Day June 1st, Monday afternoon, at the Sybil Centre (Women’s College), 15 Carillon Avenue on the Newtown side of campus Time Speaker Title 1.00pm Dominic Murphy Introduction and overview 1.15pm Jo Richards The Ecological Niche Metaphor and the Rise of Western Anorexia Nervosa in Hong Kong […]

  • Sex as a Process – Paul E. Griffiths – University of Sydney and Macquarie University

    The Sibyl Centre 15 Carillon Avenue, Newtown, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: Biological sex is defined by anisogamy: males produce small gametes, females large gametes. This definition has been criticised as a ‘sex binary’ harmful to sexual and gender minorities. Such criticism conflates gametic sex, which is binary, with phenotypic sex, which is not. There are two gametic sexes, but many kinds of sexed bodies combining […]

  • Proprioception and Knowledge of the External World in the Long 18th Century – Antonia LoLordo – University of Virginia

    Madsen Room 331 Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract:  Mary Shepherd says that motion (or the power of motion) is a sixth sense (or sixth sense organ).  I argue that she is talking about proprioception.  Shepherd thus holds that proprioception plays a crucial role in acquiring knowledge of the external world, as well as in acquiring the concepts involved.  I further argue that proprioception plays a […]

  • Fitness landscapes past, present, and future – Andreas Wagner – University of Zurich

    Madsen Room 331 Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract The fitness landscape or adaptive landscape is an iconic metaphor of evolutionary biology that has also been influential in unrelated areas of science, such as psychology and operations research. I present a brief history of the concept in biology, and discuss how early theory predicts that landscapes with many peaks – rugged landscapes – […]

  • A war inside a war: fighting drug addiction during the decolonization of Vietnam – Claire Eddington – University of California

    Madsen Room 331 Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: This talk opens in Hanoi on the eve of decolonization of French Indochina and the division of Vietnam into a Communist-controlled North, and a US-backed South. After decades of administering a state-run opium monopoly, in late 1953 the French government and its Vietnamese allies moved to ban all opium use and to require all […]

  • Euthenics, Women, and the Making of Better Environments – David PD Munns – City University of New York

    Madsen Room 331 Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: In 1904, Ellen Richards introduced “euthenics.” By 1912, Lewellys Barker, director of medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, would tell the New York Times that the “task of eugenics” and the “task of euthenics” was the “Task for the Nation.” Alongside the emergence of hereditarian eugenics, where fate was firmly rooted in heredity, […]

  • Multiple Routes to Enculturated Cognition – Professor Richard Menary – Macquarie University

    Madsen Room 331 Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: Accounts of distinctively human cognition increasingly agree that culture is constitutive rather than merely additive, yet they continue to assume that each cognitive capacity has a canonical developmental pathway (Carruthers 2026; Tomasello 2024). The multiple routes model of enculturation denies this. There is no canonical route to an enculturated capacity, and structurally different processes […]

  • Expanding the Reflex Beyond Nervous Systems: animal preparations, tropism, and the presumption of stimulus-response sufficiency – Matthew Sims – Macquarie University

    Madsen Room 331 Madsen Building F09, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia

    Abstract: Contemporary biologists and philosophers often explain unicellular behaviour in terms of simple stimulus-response mechanisms, even where it appears to involve memory, learning, or context-sensitive evaluation. This talk traces one historical route by which exhaustive explanations in terms of reflex-like behaviour became presumptively available for organisms lacking nervous systems: the animal preparation experiments of eighteenth- and […]