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Sophia Efstathiou is a Researcher at the Program for Applied Ethics, NTNU (PhD 2009, University of California at San Diego). She has worked on central topics in the philosophy of science and medicine. With Nancy Cartwright and others she in 2005 published 'Laws', in the Oxford Handbook for Philosophy of Science, and 'Hunting Causes and Using them: Is there no bridge from here to there?' International Journal for Philosophy of Science, 2011. Upcoming publications include 'Health and Beauty as Biomedical Norms', in Concepts of Health and Illness, edited by Havi Carel and Rachel Cooper for Acumen. She writes about her lecture:

The history of using "race" terms in medicine is loaded. Race concepts have been used to express false claims and to treat people cruelly. And all this is not in the past: ‘race' is a concept still multiply understood and multiply used, and still used to questionable ends. This paper unpacks a seeming paradox: a concept used to formulate, promote and legitimate oppressive ideologies, a concept used to formulate mistaken, because they were typological, biological theories about human diversity, a concept used to measure civil rights violations is, it seems, the same concept that now promises to deliver wonderful, socially sensitized, innovative results in social and genetic epidemiology. But how could that be? How could scientists expect a concept as "bad" as ordinary race to deliver useful scientific results?

My answer is a general one. There is a process through which some ordinary concepts become embedded in a scientific context, and can thereby function there as scientific. A concept often stays tagged by its original, ordinary term through this process; but it need not. Through this process a concept can be transfigured from some ordinary one, to ones extraordinary and scientific. Some such, founded race concepts are the concepts scientists are now using to relate ordinary "race" (and even "ethnicity") with genetic variation. The science that results from embedding ordinary ideas in science I thereby call found science, by analogy to the art of objects trouvés, i.e.found art. Whether found science is good science is an extra question we need to ask, but at least it is possible to frame and ask, using a founded concept of race.

ANTIKVARIATET, Nedre Bakklandet 4, kl. 18.00 presis