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2002–2003 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 examining, 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 interests of the Center’s faculty. The principal public forum of the Center is the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, whose program during its 43rd session ranged from medical ethics to Humean skepticism, from heterogeneous complexity in biology to the concept of information in philosophy, from the phenomenology of time to quantum theories of space-time, and from the history of the FBI and Einstein to the history of quantum complementarity. The Colloquium plays an important role in bringing together members of the BU community—for example, in the session honoring the retiring Leroy Rouner—as well as the international community by offering a forum for exploring the nature of science and its place in our lives.

Academic Activities of Center Members

Alfred I. Tauber
Director
Professor Tauber continued to work on his book concerning patient autonomy and physician responsibility, Sick Autonomy: The Misalignment of Patient Rights with Power Politics, which will be published by The MIT Press. The theme of this work was presented in two Colloquium papers: “Autonomy gone mad” (September 23rd “Perspectives on Medical Ethics”) and “Philosophical Arguments on Medical Rationing” (December 2nd). Several papers related to this project also appeared: 1) “The Ethical Imperative of Holism in Medicine,” in Promises and Limits of Reductionism in the Biomedical Sciences, M. H. V. Van Regenmortel and D. L. Hull (eds.) West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2002, pp. 261–78; 2) “So many Patients, so much Pain,” Newsday, September 22, 2002, p. A32; 3) “Implementing Medical Ethics,” Journal of the Israel Medical Association. 4:1091-2, 2002; 4) “A Philosophical Approach to Rationing,” Australian Journal of Medicine, 178:456-8; 5) “Autonomy Gone Mad,” Philosophy in the Contemporary World, 10:75-80, 2003. Professor Tauber’s interests in American Transcendentalism continued with the publication of 1) “A Mirror of Ourselves—Reflections on Thoreau,” Bostonia (Winter 2001–2002): 34-37; 2) “Emerson and Thoreau on America the Beautiful,” Rendezvous. 36:57-78, 2002. Other works on Thoreau and immunology are in press.

Robert S. Cohen
Director, Emeritus
Professor Cohen entered into an agreement with the Special Collections Division at the BU Mugar Library to establish the Robert S. Cohen Archive. Personal academic and public papers and correspondence from Cohen’s files will be contributed, as well as the records of the CPHS from its beginning in 1960 to 1992, correspondence and textual materials from the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science from 1960 to 1992, and also the files of the academically associated book series Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vienna Circle Collection, and Studies in the History of Modern Science. Also being contributed are files and other records from Cohen’s University services as Chairman of the Departments of Physics and of Philosophy, as Acting Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and as Chair of the Faculty Council. Materials from his career as Trustee at Wesleyan University, and at Tufts University will be included. The Archive will hold tapes and other records from such sources as Boston Colloquium lectures and symposia, course lectures, and ample posters, photos, and other visual records. Rare books and manuscripts, and first edition books will be part of the Archive. There will be sections devoted to the papers of particular authors whose materials are in Cohen’s files and which deserve archival care. Work on the preparation and transfer of these materials has been undertaken and will require another full academic year. This has been done by Professor Cohen in collaboration with Dr. Enzo de Pellegrin, and partly supported by funds from the Institut Wiener Kreis. An initial exhibition of selections from this Archive will be shown in October 2003 at the Institut in Vienna, and a copy of a major portion of the Cohen Archive will be given to the Institut. Full access to the Archive will be controlled by the Office of Special Collections. An online guide will be prepared and will serve as catalogue.

Professor Cohen continues as member of a psychiatry seminar at the Cambridge Hospital, devoted to critical studies of methods and practices. He served as Visiting Professor 2002–2003 in the Union University Graduate Program and continued as co-editor of the Boston Studies—five volumes of which were published in 2002–2003. Cohen contributed to the Leroy Rouner Symposium of the Boston Colloquium on February 10 with a lecture “The Paradox of Religion.” That evening Cohen was honored by a CPHS tendered celebration of his 80th birthday.

Peter Bokulich
Assistant Director
In December, Peter Bokulich successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Horizons of Description: Black Holes and Complementarity,” at the University of Notre Dame. Some conclusions from this dissertation were offered in a presentation entitled “Black Holes, Complementarity, and Quantum Gravity” at the October 15th Boston Colloquium session, “Seventy-Five Years of Complementarity.” He is currently preparing a paper entitled “Disturbance and the Limits of Classical Concepts,” which clarifies how classical mechanical descriptions are secured for measuring devices. He is also co-authoring a paper with Alisa Bokulich on Niels Bohr’s account of classical concepts and complementarity. This past year Dr. Bokulich taught four classes on topics in the history of science for the Boston University writing program. He has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, where he will spend next year writing a book on debates that took place from 1929 to 1963 over the consistency of field quantization. This past year he has attended numerous conferences on philosophy of science and philosophy of physics, and together with Alisa Bokulich, he organized the Boston Area Philosophy of Physics Discussion group, which has had an extremely successful inaugural year with over a dozen members regularly attending.

Research Fellows
 
Miriam Balaban
Miriam Balaban is Secretary General of the European Desalination Society and is responsible for scientific programs and policy of the society, including coordination with the European Commission. She covers the history of desalination and its development over the last half century through the journal, Desalination, which she has founded and edited over the last 37 years, and the Desalination Directory. She gives lectures based on this experience. She serves on scientific program committees of conferences in various countries on different topics of desalination —this year in Toulouse, Nice, Malta, Bratislava, L’Aquila, La Spezia, Algiers, Marrakesh, Crete, Izmir, Korea, and others. She has now been selected by the US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council to serve on the committee to assess the US Roadmap for research on desalination technology. Balaban has received awards for her lifetime of service in desalination from the European Desalination Society and has been invited to be an honorary member of the European Membrane Society. She continues her publishing activities and participates in deliberations on electronic publishing. She has recently edited a volume to commemorate the 50th anniversary of DNA (The Secret of Life) with articles by distinguished scientists and by herself. Balaban is president of the International Federation of Science Editors.

Lin Chun
Dr. Lin Chun took a two-term sabbatical from the London School of Economics, which enabled her to attend the Boston Colloquia and use the Mugar Library more frequently. She was also involved in the activities at the Weatherhead Center for International Studies at Harvard and the MIT/Harvard joint project on “policy culture.” She helped to organize an international conference on globalization and China in Hangzhou (July 2002) in which the perception of “east” in the western mind was a main theme. She continued her editorial work for Political Studies, to write reports for publishers and journals, and to supervise research students in the histories of political philosophy (Indian, Thai, Brazilian). Her recent publications include “The irony of cultural Marxism” (in Japanese), Situation, June 2002; “China” (in French), in S. Amin and F. Houtart, eds. Globalization and Resistance, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002; “Uneven and Compressed Development” (in English), in I. Wallerstein and A. Clesse, eds. The World We are Entering 2000–2050, Dutch UP, 2002; and “What is China’s ‘Comparative Advantage’?” (in Chinese), Dushu, no. 3, 2003. She is working on her new book project on the methodological problems in political inquiry, which encourage ethnocentrism and cultural particularism.

Gennady Gorelik
Dr. Gorelik’s major research and writing project of this year was “Science and Life of a Russian Entrepreneur.” Its subject is a crossing of history of science and technology, history of Soviet antiballistic missile defense, and a post-Soviet success story of a major private company created by a team of former ABM radio-engineers. The book is being published in a Russian magazine Znanie-sila in installments since September 2002. Dr. Gorelik’s piece “Andrei Sakharov and Edward Teller” was published in The Oxford Companion to The History of Modern Science, J. L. Heilbron (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2003. His review of Sakharov: a Biography, by R. Lourie (2002), was published in Physics World, August 2002. He has authored two filmscripts for the Russian TV documentary series “Secret Physicists” (on Andrei Sakharov and Aleksandr Mints); the films were shown in November 2002. Dr Gorelik’s homepage presents his publications and other activities. For his publications in Russian click here.
 
Helena Gourko
In 2002/2003 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, for publication by Kluwer Academic Publishers, and submitted it to the publisher. This book was assembled by Dr. Gourko from numerous essays, excerpts, and notes of David Zilberman, and translated from Russian. It was then accompanied by an extensive introduction and supplied by the editorial notes and appendices. This book was edited together with Professor Robert Cohen. Dr. Gourko continues to work on her other projects that 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 Symbolism, Imyaslavie, and Deconsruction. A number of articles written by Dr. Gourko—“Deconstruction,” “Difference,” “Postmodernity,” “Philosophy of Religion,” “David Zilberman,” and others—appeared in the second edition of The Newest Philosophical Dictionary (Moscow: Progress, 2002; in Russian).

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 continuing 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 is also plans further study of a mapping technique for use in analyzing other qualitative systems to capture visually the variations within the function of a system.

Andrea Grignolio
During the Fall Semester of the 2002 academic year, Andrea Grignolio carried out his Ph.D. research on information theory in immunology. The research project aims to analyze how, after 1948 and until the 1960s, information theory, and in general the information metaphor, was used within the theoretical debate on the nature of the antibody formation mechanisms, and whether in the work F.M. Burnet, N.K. Jerne, and D. Talmage—three advocates of a Darwinian approach in understanding the immune response—information theory carried out an heuristic role in the transition from instructive to selective models of antibody formation. Grignolio will present a paper on this topic at the 2003 meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), which will be held in Vienna.
 
Emily Kutash
Dr. Emilie Kutash is now working on a book on Proclus and the influence of the Sciences of his time on his systematic philosophy. Her paper commenting on Dimitri Nikulin’s paper on Proclus’ Institutia Physica is published in the Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium on Ancient Philosophy, June 2003. A review essay entitled “Robert Hahn’s Anaximander and the Architects” was published in the Graduate Faculty Philosophy J. (Vol. 23, 2, 2002), and a Review of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion appeared in Transcendent Philosophy, an internet journal. “Proclus’ Theories of Motion and Einstein’s theory of Relativity” is in press (Neoplatonism and American Thought, ed. by J. Bregman, SUNY). Her article “The Third and the Fifth Day vs. the Eternal Now” was published in Thinking About the Environment: Our Debt to the Classical and Medieval Past (eds. Thomas M. Robinson and Laura Westra, Lexington Press). In May of 2002, Dr. Kutash presented a paper at Bard College: Institute for Advanced Theology, “Dream Incubation and Meditation in the Ancient Near East.” In January she presented a paper, “A Neoplatonic Philosophy into a Pagan Theology and a Tale of Two Cities” about the late Athenian and Alexandrian academies and their contrasting response to Christianity. In June 2003 she will present a paper on Proclus’ theory of the Soul and his Elements of Physics at the International Society for Neoplatonic Studies in New Orleans. In 2002 she presented a paper at the ISNS at the University of Maine: “Abstract Expressionism and Minimal Art is it Neoplatonic?” Reflecting some ongoing work on Judaism and its reactions to philosophy in antiquity and in modern times, in March she presented a paper to the regional meeting of the American Academy of Religion, “Greek Poison: the Jewish Disdain for Metaphysics.”
 
Susan Lanzoni
Over the past year, Susan Lanzoni, Research Associate and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center, has been conducting research on the history of the existential approach in psychiatry in both European and American contexts. Her article on the early work of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, entitled “An Epistemology of the Clinic: Ludwig Binswanger’s Phenomenology of the Other,” will appear in the journal Critical Inquiry in the Fall of 2003. In this essay, Dr. Lanzoni describes Binswanger’s work at the intersection of phenomenology, a psychology of empathy, and the demands of psychiatric clinic practice. She presented 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 at the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences in Chicago. In January, she gave a lecture at the Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar, Cornell Medical School, entitled “The Origins of Encounter in Existential Psychiatry.” A version of this talk is presently under review at the journal History of Psychiatry. In November she will present a paper at the History of Science Society annual meeting entitled “The Prominence of Subjective Experience in Phenomenological Psychiatry, 1912–1922” as part of panel she organized on the topic, Subjectivity in Crisis: European Psychiatry and Patient Experience (1880–1920).

Arkadi Lipkine
Dr. Lipkine, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, received a Fulbright Grant to spend the spring semester visiting the Center, where he continued to work on foundations of quantum mechanics and other branches of physics. He offered a presentation on his work at a meeting of the Boston Area Philosophy of Physics Reading Group and at a seminar at the philosophy department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also spoke on the foundations of physics at a seminar at the department of philosophy at Stanford University. He is currently working on two papers: “Two Views on the Foundation of Physics: Rationalism of Galileo and Hilbert vs. Empiricism of Bacon and Feynman” and “Structure of Foundations of Quantum Mechanics and Other Branches of Physics: ‘Primary Ideal Object’ View.” In his reports and texts he develops an original view on the foundations of physics in which one must distinguish clearly between a phenomenon, its theoretical model, and “Primary Ideal Objects,” which are used for making the model. Each branch of physics has its own system of basic concepts and postulates, which define Primary Ideal Objects; this system of concepts he refers to as a “Nucleus of a Branch of Physics.” Further information can be found at http://science.rsuh.ru/Arkady/ENGL/Indexengl.htm.

Lee McIntyre
Dr. McIntyre has had three articles accepted for publication during the past year. “Taking Underdetermination Seriously” will appear in The Nordic Journal of Philosophy, “Intentionality, Pluralism, and Redescription” will appear in Philosophy of the Social Sciences’ and “Recent Work in the Philosophy of Chemistry” will appear in The Philosophical Review. He is currently working on a review of Making Social Science Matter by Bent Flyvbjerg that will appear in Philosophy of Science. Another article, “Redescription and Descriptivism,” is currently under review at a philosophical journal. This spring Dr. McIntyre served as Adjunct Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, where he taught a lecture course in Ethics. He currently serves as Associate Director of the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Enzo De Pellegrin
Dr. De Pellegrin has continued to prepare an archival transfer of the Center’s historical material to the Institute Vienna Circle, Vienna, Austria, and Boston University Special Collections. The material, deposited at the Center for the Philosophy and History of Science, is 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. With the initiation of a preservation and digitization project, audio tape recordings of lectures, conferences and symposia held at Boston University are being made accessible for future scholarly use. Apart from editorial work, Enzo De Pellegrin is currently writing on early analytic philosophy. His research focuses on the philosophies of Rudolf Carnap (late 1920s, early 1930s), Moritz Schlick, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (early and late).

Thomas Winner
Thomas G. Winner spent the last year finishing his book on the Czech interwar avant garde. An important aspect in this process will be a journey to the Prague literary archives for the collection of illustrations which, for this book, are particularly important. He also published a number of articles on the late Czech literary critic V. Macura, which appeared in Czech and in English in Prague and Tartu (Estonia). An abbreviated version appeared also in the Helsinki journal Slavica Fennica. These articles were based on lectures presented last year in Helsinki and Tartu. In November, he gave the opening lecture of the exhibit on the Central European avant garde at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was unable to attend the international Memorial conference on the late Jurij Mixajlovic Lotman. But his paper for this conference, a memoir on his discovery in Moscow of some seminal publications by Lotman, which he then published with an introduction in English, appeared in the Tartu journal Semeiotike which was published this spring.

Associated Faculty

Alisa Bokulich
Professor Alisa Bokulich was recently awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Scholars Award for her book project “Classical Concepts in Quantum Theory.” This grant will provide her with a leave of absence from teaching for the 2003–2004 academic year. Professor Bokulich also published two articles this past year: The first, “Horizontal Models: From Bakers to Cats,” will be appearing in Philosophy of Science (vol. 70, num. 3) and the second, “Quantum Measurements and Supertasks,” will be appearing in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (vol. 17, issue 2). She gave a talk on her recent research entitled “Open or Closed? Dirac, Heisenberg, and the Relation between Classical and Quantum Mechanics” at the conference “Philosophical Issues in Physics: A Conference in Honor of James T. Cushing” held at the University of Notre Dame. She has been an active participant in the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science as well, moderating the March 24th session and presenting a paper “Do Theoretical Values Change? Kuhn and Longino Revisited” in the February 10th session “Science and Human Values Revisited.” In addition to her teaching in the Philosophy Department she continues to be a core faculty member in the graduate program in Science, Philosophy, and Religion. She and Peter Bokulich successfully launched a new Boston Area Philosophy Physics Reading Group in 2002.
 
Peter Schwartz
This fall, Peter Schwartz’s paper “The Continuing Usefulness Account of Proper Function” appeared in an anthology from Oxford University Press (Functions: New Readings in the Philosophy of Psychology and Biology, eds. R. Cummins, M. Perlman, and A. Ariew). Also this fall, Professor Schwartz gave a talk at the Center entitled “Conceptual Analysis in the Function Debate and Beyond,” and an edited version of the paper is currently under review for publication. At the University of Miami this spring, he gave a talk entitled “Clinical Trial(s) and Error: Acquiring and Applying Evidence,” on the use of evidence in medicine. In addition to continuing to teach in the BU Department of Philosophy, Dr. Schwartz is now a senior resident in the Department of Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
 
John Stachel
Published articles by Dr. Stachel this year include “A Brief History of Space-Time,” in 2001: A Relativistic Space-Time Odyssey (eds. Lusanna et al., World Scientific); “Critical Realism: Bhaskar and Wartofsky,” in Constructivism and Practice (ed. Gould, Rowman & Littlefield); “Autobiographical Reflections,” in Revisiting the Foundations of Relativistic Physics: Festschrift in Honor of John Stachel (eds. Abhay Ashtekar, Jürgen Renn et al, Kluwer Academic); and a book review “Anti-Einstein Sentiment Surfaces Again,” in the April 2003 issue of Physics World. Dr. Stachel is currently reading proof on the first volume of a two-volume collection of his papers entitled Going Critical, to be published by Kluwer Academic Press. The first volume is subtitled The Challenge of Practice; the second is subtitled The Practice of Relativity. In addition to reprints of previously published papers, a number of previously unpublished papers will appear in each volume. Dr. Stachel has given invited lectures at a symposium on quantum gravity at the annual meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association (Milwaukee) and at international conference on relativity in Mexico City, a symposium on Einstein at the Socialist Scholars Conference (New York City), and a panel discussion on Einstein at the 92nd Street Y (New York City). He also spoke at a one-day conference on Einstein at the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) and (with the help of a National Science Foundation travel grant) will be giving an invited paper this July at the Tenth Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity. At Boston University, Dr. Stachel spoke on “A Brief History of Space-Time” at the Colloquium “Perspectives on Quantum Gravity: A Tribute to John Stachel,” commented on Fred Jerome’s Colloquium talk on “The Einstein File,” and moderated the session of the Colloquium on “Seventy-Five Years of Complementarity.”