Elena Casetta (CFCUL - Centre for Philosophy of Science of the University of Lisbon)

March 24 MON — 12.30-14.30

Sala Riunioni — Direzione del Dipartimento (Via Festa del Perdono 7, Milano)

Biodiversity Surgery

Elena Casetta & Jorge L.M. da Silva

Abstract: In his foundational article, “What Is Conservation Biology?” (1985), Michael Soulé explains that Conservation biology is often a crisis discipline and claims that its relation to biology or ecology “is analogous to that of surgery to physiology and war to political science. In crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts; crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information.” This presentation is about such surgery. Firstly, some data about the so-called “Big Sixth”—the disease at issue and its severity—will be presented. Then epistemic and epistemological difficulties of the initial phases of the surgery, namely extinction assessment and conservation prioritization, will be pointed out. In conclusion, it will be suggested that the extent of these difficulties is of such significance to require a thorough re-assessment of the very nature of the patients, i.e., outside the metaphor, of the concept of species.