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2001–2002 Annual Report

The Center for Philosophy and History of Science followed its traditional mission of offering a site for post-graduate scholarly exchange concerning all aspects of the philosophy and history of science, and to examine, in the broadest humanistic and social context, the factors that govern science, mathematics, and logic. The individual reports of the various members of the Center (listed below) highlight the wide range of interest of the Center’s faculty. The principal public forum of the Center is the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, whose program, during its 42nd session ranged from discussions of developmental biology to the interface of psychiatry and philosophy; from unification theories in physics to the aesthetics of American philosophers; from scientific biography to the philosophy of personal identity; from the philosophies of Frege to Tarski to Stanley Rosen. The electric program sponsored by the Center continues to draw speakers and audiences from fields outside the usual constellation of science studies, in the effort to explore the deep influence of science on our culture and the forces that help define the scientific endeavor.

The individual academic activities of the Center’s faculty are presented below:

Alfred I. Tauber
Director
Professor Tauber’s publications focused on two areas, theoretical immunology and medical ethics. In the former, he published 1) “Moving beyond the immune self?” Seminars in Immunology. 12:241-48, 2000, and 2) “The biological notion of self and nonself.,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Science, 2002. In ethics, he published: 1) “Historical and philosophical reflections on patient autonomy,” Health Care Analysis: An International Journal of Health Care Philosophy and Policy 9:299-319, 2001; 2) “Medicine, public health and the ethics of rationing.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 45:16-30, 2002; 3) “The quest for holism in medicine,” in The Role of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Accommodating Pluralism, D. Callahan (ed.). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2002, pp. 172–89; and 4) “Putting ethics into the medical record,” Annals of Internal Medicine. 136:559-63, 2002. These papers will comprise the body of a new book, tentatively titled, Sick Autonomy (The MIT Press), a study of the status of patient autonomy and its relation to physician fiduciary responsibility. A conference, Dignity and Dialogue. Exploring Medicine’s Relational Foundations (Rosendal, Norway; June 9–13, 2002) was dedicated to exploring Tauber’s book, Confessions of a Medicine Man (The MIT Press, 1999). There he delivered the keynote address, “Autonomy, the self, and medical ethics.” Two public lectures were presented in the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science: 1) In the symposium, Scientific Biography and the Biographer, he delivered a paper on Henry David Thoreau’s journals: “Autobiography as Biography: The Naturalist’ Journal” (November 6, 2001); 2) In Nature, The Natural, and the Supernatural: American Perspectives on Nature, he presented “Ralph Waldo Emerson” (April 15, 2002). (Both papers are available on the Center’s website.) At The Center for History of Recent Science at George Washington University, on May 31, 2002, Dr. Tauber presented “‘Waiting for the end’, revisited” at the immunology workshop entitled, Immunology and Molecular Biology, 1955–1990: Converging Research Programs

Robert S. Cohen
Director, Emeritus
Professor Robert S. Cohen spoke on the development of logical empiricism at the celebration of the 10th anniversary of the Institute Vienna Circle, July 12–14, 2001. Editorial research projects underway include: Felix Kaufmann, Methodology of Social Sciences, translation and introductory essays of the 1934 treatise, Otto Neurath, Economic Writings, translated with introductory essays (in collaboration with Thomas Uebel), this is the third of Cohen’s translations of Neurath for the Vienna Circle Collection; Edgar Zilsel, Die Enstehung des Geniebegriffes, in collaboration with Joanna Zilsel. Together with JŸrgen Renn, Kostas Gavroglu and Abner Shimony he is editing an international Festschriftfor John Stachel. Cohen is editor and contributor to a forthcoming Festschriftfor the long-time acquisitions editor at Kluwer Academic Publishers for the Vienna Circle Collection and the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. In collaboration with Enzo De Pellegrin he is undertaking the preparation of the archive of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science and of his associated professional papers. Robert S. Cohen continues his participation in a seminar on healing in the Department of Psychiatry at the Cambridge Hospital.

Research Fellows
 
Miriam Balaban

Peter Bokulich
Peter Bokulich published “Black Hole Remnants and Classical vs. Quantum Gravity” in Philosophy of Science 68 (2001) pp. S407–S423. This paper clarifies the argumentative strategy of a proposed solution to the problem of information loss in black holes and argues for the interpretive significance of recognizing proposed limits for effective theories. He was also invited to present “Black Hole Remnants, Complementarity, and the Information Loss Paradox” at the 2002 Quantum Gravity for Philosophers Seminar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In addition to his research on current issues in quantum gravity, Bokulich has been working to clarify the history of field quantization and the concept of complementarity. He presented “Bohr on Disturbance and Quantum Uncertainty” at the 2002 meeting of the History of the Philosophy of Science Society in Montreal, and is currently preparing a paper on this topic to be submitted for publication.

Lin Chun
Dr. Lin Chun continued to teach and write at the London School of Economics and acted as an associate editor for Political Studiesand a referee for a dozen journals and publishers. Her publications during the year include “Human rights and democracy: the case of decoupling” in The International Journal of Human Rights,5:2, 2001; “Defining and defending the social” in Hitotsubashi Journal of Social Sciences, 33:1, 2001 and “Whither feminsim: a note on China” in Signs,Summer 2001. She also completed her book manuscript on the transformation of Chinese socialism to be published next year.

Gennady Gorelik Dr. Gorelik continued to work on the crossing of Russian and American histories of physics. He spent four months in Russia collecting documentary and oral-historical material for his two research and writing projects: a social biography of Lev Landau, The Soviet Life of Lev Landau and his Friendsand a history of antiballistic missile defense in the USSR. He gave two talks at the P. Kapitsa Institute of Physical Problems (Moscow) where Landau had worked for many years, “Soviet life of Lev Landau: phase transition of the 1937” and “Edward Teller and Lev Landau: Theoretical Physicists in the Time of Cold Nuclear War,” (Oct 25 and Nov 22, 2001). He delivered his paper “A Russian Perspective on the Father of the American H-Bomb” at the Colloquium on the History of Science and Technology, University of Minnesota, April 19, 2002. He also published a few articles on Lev Landau and Edward Teller in Russian popular science magazines. The issue of ABM defense was crucial to Andrei Sakharov, and remains a crucial issue in Russian-American relations. This is an important unexplored topic for the history of science and technology. Dr. Gorelik gave the fist presentation of the issue in his talk “The worst defense: ABM as the problem and emblem of the century” at the Institute for History of Science and Technology, Moscow, March 28, 2002. Two major papers on the history and philosophy of General Relativity were published in the 10th volume of Einstein Studies: “The Problem of Conservation Laws and the Poincare Quasigroup” in General Relativity;“Hermann Weyl and Large Numbers in Relativistic Cosmology” (Einstein Studies in Russia.Eds. Yu. Balashov, V. Vizgin. Boston: Birkhaeuser, 2002). Dr Gorelik’s homepage presents his publications and other activities.
 
Helena Gourko
In 2001/2002 academic year Dr. Helena Gourko continued to work on David Zilberman’s legacy. She finished preparing his book, Analogy in Indian and Western Philosophical Thought (translated by her and edited together with Professor Robert Cohen) for publication by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Her other projects initiated in 2001 include two volumes of Philosophy of Religion (a textbook, and an anthology of readings in Russian, to be published in Russia), and a book Divine Onomatology: Naming God in Deconstruction and Imyaslavie. Two chapters, “Philosophy of Religion as a Branch of Philosophical Knowledge”, and “Postmodernism within a Context of Contemporary Culture” written by Dr. Gourko, were published in Philosophy and Contemporary Culture, a collegiate textbook published in Russian in Belarus (Minsk: Universitetskoe Publishing House, 2002). A number of articles written by Dr. Gourko include “Deconstruction”, “Postmodernity”, “Philosophy of Religion”, “David Zilberman” and others, which appeared in the Philosophical Dictionary published in Russian in Belarus (Minsk: Progress, 2001).

Lillian Greeley
This past year Dr. Greeley has continued to attend conferences and to edit books and articles in the area of neurophilosophy. She is in the process of writing two articles. One is on the neurophysics of attention in the cognitive learning process that is used in generative learning, the process that generates a strategy to find a solution to an open-ended problem. The other article is on methodology and concerns an unexpected problem of using non-real derivative numbers in nonlinear analyses, which has been central to her work in the analysis of the cognitive learning process. New work has resulted in further consultation and the article should be finalized shortly. During the past year, the range of work being done with vocalizations of various animals, including whales, birds, dolphins, dogs, wolves, shrimp, lobsters and others, has increased, providing valuable information with which to study the comparative evolution of cognition and the effect of socialization on its development. Specifically, Dr. Greeley is interested in analyzing these vocalization patterns for the Spacing phenomenon that she suspects is necessary for all cognitive generative learning development. She also plans further study of a mapping technique for use in analyzing other qualitative systems to visually capture the variations within the function of a system.
 
Emily Kutash
Dr. Kutash has been working on her translation and study of Proclus’ Elements of Physics. She presented some of this work in commenting on Dimitri Nikulin’s paper on Elements of Physicsto the Boston Area Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy. Both papers will be published in the Proceedings of the BACAP. She has almost completed a paper on Elements of Physicsand Proclus theory of the soul. In August, 2001, she attended a conference of the International Plato Society in Jerusalem. Two papers have been are submitted to journals, awaiting review, one called “Dreaming in Sura and Vienna” (on dream interpretation in the Talmud and Freud), and the other titled “Golden Chains in Late Antiquity”. She will also be presenting a paper to the International Neo-Platonic Society meeting at University of Maine in June, 2002 on Neo-Platonist ideas in Abstract Expressionist and Minimalist Art. In January, 2003 she will be presenting a paper at the American Philological Association meetings in New Orleans on the Athenian Academy and its opposition to Christianity. Work on this issue continues, as does her work on Late Antiquity academies in general.
 
Susan Lanzoni
From September, 2001 to the present, Susan Lanzoni, Research Associate and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center has been conducting historical research and preparing her work for publication. She has written an article on the early work of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, entitled “An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenology of the Other.” In this essay, Lanzoni describes Binswanger’s work at the intersection of phenomenology, a psychology of empathy and the demands of psychiatric clinic practice. In February, 2002, she presented a paper at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science entitled “Bridging Phenomenology and the Asylum: Ludwig Binswanger’s Existential Analysis.” She presented this paper as part of a panel that she organized on the theme “Between Philosophy and Psychiatry: Historical and Current Themes.” She will also present her work on Binswanger and the history of empathy at the European Society of the History of the Human Sciences in Barcelona in August, 2002 and in October, 2002 she will be giving a talk at the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences in Chicago.

Lee McIntyre
Dr. McIntyre had two articles accepted for publication this past year. “Supervenience and Explanatory Exclusion” will appear in the April issue of Criticaand “Accommodation, Prediction, and Confirmation” will appear in a forthcoming issue of Perspectives on Science. He also completed writing three additional articles: “Taking Underdetermination Seriously,” “Intentionality, Pluralism, and Redescription,” and “Redescription and Descriptivism” all of which are currently under review at philosophy journals. His article “What Can Medicine Teach the Social Sciences?” remains under review. His book manuscript Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavioris still searching for a publisher. His earlier book Laws and Explanation in the Social Sciences: Defending a Science of Human Behavior (Westview Press, 1996) has just been released in paperback. Work in progress includes a collection entitled Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline, which will be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers and will appear as a volume in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Also in progress is “Emergence and Reductionism: Ontological or Epistemological Concepts?” which is scheduled to appear in that volume.

Enzo De Pellegrin
Dr. De Pellegrin has been preparing an archival transfer of historical material which, presently, is deposited at the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. As a result of this ongoing project, a substantial portion of the Robert S. Cohen Archives will be made available for use by educators and researchers at the Institute Vienna Circle as the Robert S. Cohen Collection in Vienna, Austria. The Boston University Special Collections will be the ultimate repository of these archives. In a joint effort with Professor Cohen the composition of a commented catalogue is underway which will serve to enhance accessibility of, and facilitate future research on, a great variety of documents related to the history of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, the Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism in the United States. Apart from editorial work on two forthcoming volumes, Enzo De Pellegrin is currently writing papers on early analytic philosophy and on the intellectual development of Ludwig Wittgenstein. A paper entitled “A Lack of Reverence: Schlick and Wittgenstein in 1926” has been accepted for presentation at the Fourth Biennial Congress HOPOS 2002 in Montreal, Canada.

Mirsad Priganica
Dr. Priganica, a visiting scholar from Bosnia, has been actively pursuing research in preparation for a book that he is planning to publish on the topic of hermeneutics in science.
 
Thomas Winner
Dr. Winner has almost completed his book, Interwar Czech Avantgarde Art and Aesthetics.The remaining two chapters should be completed by the end of the summer of 2002. Several articles were also completed, all the result of invitations by European scientific journals. He is presently completing a lengthy article on the work of the Czech literary theoretician Vladim’r Macura, who died in 1999. In March 2002, Dr. Winner traveled to Los Angeles on the invitation of the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) to lecture at the opening of their new exhibition on Central and East European Avant-garde Art. During his stay in Los Angeles, he also consulted with UCLA faculty and with one of their doctoral students whose dissertation he is directing. In October, 2002 he will travel to the Czech Republic, following an invitation from the Masaryk University in Brno, to present the keynote address at the opening of an international congress on avant-garde art.