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2003–2004 Annual Report

The Center for Philosophy and History of Science (CPHS) followed its traditional mission of offering a site for postgraduate 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 44th session ranged from the ethics and policy of DNA research to the structure of evolutionary theory, from chirality in Kant and contemporary physics to the fate of inflationary cosmology, from the philosophy of Thomas Reid to the naturalism of Spinoza, and from Putnam on the fact/value distinction to Einstein on poetry and truth. The Colloquium plays an important role in bringing together members of the BU community as well as the international community (for example, in the session on Whitehead’s constructivism given by Isabelle Stengers and moderated by Bruno Latour) by offering a forum for exploring the nature of science and its place in our lives.

The Center significantly enlarged its scholars program by introducing three new initiatives:

Graduate Student Dissertation Fellowship. The Center now sponsors doctoral candidates from the Department of Philosophy at Boston University in the broad arena of philosophy of science and epistemology. In 2003–4, the Center’s Fellowship was awarded to Mirja Hartimo, whose work on Husserl and the foundations of mathematics was supervised by Professor Jaakko Hintikka.

Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Center is now sponsoring a one-year postdoctoral fellowship in the area of philosophy of science, medicine, and values. In 2004–5, the Fellowship was awarded to Wendy Parker, whose research on the philosophy of meteorology will be complemented by teaching courses in applied ethics and history of science.

Exchange Program with The Cohn Institute for History of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. An exchange program between faculty and graduate students from Tel Aviv University and Boston University will commence in September 2004. Joint appointments in the Center and the Department of Philosophy have been arranged for Professor Gideon Freundenthal, who will visit in the fall semester and teach a graduate seminar on the German Jewish Enlightenment, and for Professor Adi Ophir, who will visit in the spring semester and teach a seminar in modern Continental political thought. Two graduate students, Guy Weinberger and Leon Jacobowitz, will each spend one year at the Center and the Department of Philosophy to complete their research studies.

Academic Activities of Center Members

Alfred I. Tauber
Director
Professor Tauber continued to publish on American Transcendentalism, the history of immunology, and medical ethics. Each area is linked by his interest in the epistemological relation of facts and values and the moral concerns of personal identity: 1) “The philosopher as prophet: The case of Emerson and Thoreau” Philosophy in the Contemporary World. 10:89-103, 2003; 2) “Immunology and the enigma of selfhood,” in Growing Explanation, M. Norton Wise (ed.). Durham: Duke University Press. In press; 3) “Immunology” in The Philosophy of Science: An Encyclopedia, edited by S. Sarkar. New York: Routledge, In press; 4) Self-portrait as history of science, in Writing Recent Science: The Historiography of Contemporary Science, Technology, and Medicine, R. E. Doal and T. Soderqvist (eds.). London and New York: Routledge, In press; 5) “Metchnikoff and the phagocytosis theory” Nature Reviews, Cell Biology. 4:897-901, 2003; 6) “Medical ethics” in Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, J. W. V. van Huyssteen, N. R. Howell, N. H. Gregersen, W. J. Wildman, (eds.). New York: Macmillan, 2003. pp. 548–52; 7) “Sick autonomy” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 46:484-95, 2003. His public lectures included “The Call for a Moral Epistemology,” Putnam on the Fact/Value Distinction, Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, Boston University, October 22, 2003; “Immunology and the Enigma of Selfhood,” Cohn Institute for the History of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University, Jan. 5, 2004; “Medicine and the Call for a Moral Epistemology,” Philosophical Issues in Medical Science Conference, University of Birmingham (AL), May 14, 2004.

Dr. Tauber has accepted three new appointments: 1) In recognition of his scholarship bridging the humanities and medicine, he was named the Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, whose faculty he joined in 1982, as a biochemist and hematologist. 2) As part of the larger exchange program between Tel Aviv University and Boston University in the area of science studies, Dr. Tauber was appointed a Sackler Fellow at the Sackler Institute of Advanced Studies of Tel Aviv University, where he has on-going scientific collaborations and teaching assignments in The Cohn Institute for History of Science and Ideas. 3) Tauber was elected to the Board of Trustees of Tufts University, where he received his B.S. degree in 1969 and M.D. in 1973.

Robert S. Cohen
Director, Emeritus
Professor Cohen is in the midst of establishing the Robert S. Cohen Archive at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (HGARC). This large collection includes important materials from the history of CPHS, as well as personal academic and public papers, manuscripts, and correspondence from Cohen’s files, including documents from his faculty career at Yale, Wesleyan, and Boston University. The CPHS’s records, from its beginning in 1960 to 1992, include correspondence and textual materials from the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and also the files of the three academically associated book series: Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vienna Circle Collection, and Studies in the History of Modern Science. Various journals and individual book manuscripts are also included. The Archive will hold tapes and other records from such sources as Boston Colloquium lectures and symposia, course lectures, as well as visual records (e.g., posters and photos). Rare books and manuscripts, and first edition books will be donated. There will be sections devoted to the papers of particular authors whose materials are in Cohen’s files and which deserve archival care, including those of Max Raphael, David Zilberman, and Otto Neurath. Also being contributed are files and other personal 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, as well as his military, political, international, and civil libertarian activities. The preparation and transfer of these materials has been done by Professor Cohen in collaboration with Dr. Enzo de Pellegrin, and supported by funds from CPHS, the Institut Wiener Kreis, and the Boston Philosophy of Science Association. An initial exhibition of selections from this Archive was shown in October 2003 at the Institut in Vienna, and a printed copy of a major portion of the Cohen Archive was given to the Institut. Full access to the Archive will be controlled by HGARC. An online guide will be prepared and will serve as catalogue. The Archive project is expected to be completed by June, 2005.

Professor Cohen continues as a member of a psychiatry seminar at the Cambridge Hospital, devoted to critical studies of “Healing: methods and practices.” He served as Visiting Professor 2002–2003 in the Union University Graduate Program and continued as co-editor of the Vienna Circle Collection and of Boston Studies—seven volumes of which were published in 2003–2004—and the journal Science in Context. In October 2003, he was an invited lecturer to an Austrian-French Colloquium on Encyclopedism at the French Cultural Institute in Vienna; he spoke on “Diderot and Neurath, Encyclopedism, and the Unity-of-Science program.”

Debra Daugherty
Assistant Director
In addition to performing her duties as assistant director of the Center and bringing her first child, Sophie Emma Hérant, into the world, Ms. Daugherty continued research toward the completion of her dissertation examining historical attitudes toward the role of symmetries in theories of phase transitions and condensed matter physics. This year she has focused her research on the nineteenth century borderland between chemistry and crystallography, where the work of chemist Eilhard Mitschlerich, mineralogist Gustav Rose, crystallographer Ludwig Frankenheim, and physicist and crystallographer Otto Lehmann—guided by the Berzelian aim of unifying the phenomena of isomerism and polymorphism—led to the understanding of polymorphic crystalline forms as Gibbsean phases and to conflict over the status of symmetries in reasoning about thermodynamic phenomena. She also participated in two monthly readings groups, the Boston Area Philosophy of Physics Reading Group and another on structural realism.

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 Saudi Arabia, Malta, Crete, Slovakia, Algeria, China, Korea, Spain, Italy, Bahrain, Kuwait, Mexico and the States. She has 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. Balaban is president of the International Federation of Science Editors.

Lin Chun
During a year of regular teaching and other work, Dr. Lin Chun has further revised her monograph The Transformation of Chinese Socialism, forthcoming from Duke University Press. She attended the 8th Philosophy World Congress in Istanbul last August, where she was invited to participate in the UNESCO's working session on the conception of human rights and chaired three social science sessions. She gave a paper last November at a Harvard/MIT Policy Culture workshop on re-conceptualizing work/leisure and (un)employment. To view the text click here. In December she spoke at a round table on “post cold war communism standing after the fall” held in NYU's International Center for Advanced Studies. She has continued to work on a book concerning methodological issues in political science. Her current projects also include a long essay which is an ethical argument for the integrity of human rights and eliminating poverty.

Gennady Gorelik
Dr. Gorelik has finished his research and writing project “Science and life of a Russian entrepreneur”—at the 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 preliminary version of the book was published in the Russian popular-science magazine “Znanie-sila” in 2002–03. Gorelik has prepared a revised 2nd edition of his biography of Andrei Sakharov and its English version for a Russian publisher and Oxford University Press. His current major project is a social biography of Lev Landau, “The Soviet Life of Lev Landau and his Friends”. Doing this project, Gorelik has made two research trips to Russia last fall and spring. His piece “Stirrings of Religion in the Soviet H-bomb Lab” is published in the Newsletter of the Center for History of Physics, American Institute of Physics (Spring 2003). He gave a talk “Leonid Mandelshtam and his school” at the Institute for History of Science and Technology, Moscow, April 13, 2004. Dr Gorelik’s homepage presents his publications and other activities.
 
Helena Gourko
In 2003–2004 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 resubmitted it to the publisher after revision by Prof. Cohen. 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 Prof. Robert Cohen. She 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, “Time in Deconstruction”, “Grammatology”, “Zilberman”, “Something Related to Grammatology”, “Presentation of Time”, “Spectres of Marx”, “Force and Signification”, “Death in Deconstruction”, appeared in Encyclopedia of Postmodernity (Minsk: Knizhnyi Dom, 2003, in Russian), as well as an article “Spectres of Marx” in Encyclopedia of Sociology (Minsk: Knizhnyi Dom, 2003, in Russian). In the spring of 2004, she taught a course “Religion and Culture” at the Metropolitan College of Boston University.

Lillian Greeley
This past year Dr. Greeley has continued research into the area of the nonlinear process of attention in the learning process and to attend conferences and edit articles in the area of neuroscience and neurophilosophy. Her work focuses primarily on the neurodynamics of attention in the cognitive-generative learning process, the process that generates a strategy to find a solution to an open-ended problem. She is especially interested in a systems approach to neuroscience rather than a unit study approach. Towards this end, she has developed a methodology that will allow social science disciplines to graphically probe systems by adaptation of a nonlinear dynamics methodological technique, Ruelle and Taken’s Theorem Protocol, which allows the system to be graphically studied in four dimensions, including time, and adds another methodological tool to qualitative research methods [“Probability Attractors, A Visual Analysis Methodology Adapted from Ruelle and Taken’s Theorem [RTT] Protocol for Qualitative Systems Research,” 2004]. She is interested in applying the methodology to the work being done with vocalizations of various animals in order to obtain data 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.
 
Emily Kutash
In January 2003, Emilie Kutash gave a paper entitled “A Neoplatonic Tale of Two Cities” to the American Philological Society, and in January 2004, she gave “What did Plato Read” to the American Philological Society in San Francisco. The latter work is under consideration for publication. In June 2004, Dr. Kutash gave the paper “A Physics for the Psyche,” and in October 2004, she gave a paper to the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy entitled “Greek Poison: The Jewish Disdain for Metaphysics” at Fordham University. She organized a panel for the June Neoplatonic Society meetings at Liverpool University, where she also presented a paper on Time and Eternity in Proclus. Dr. Kutash is completing a book on Proclus “Proclus In and Out of Context,” covering Proclus’ pagan religious context and his scientific and metaphysical system.
 
Susan Lanzoni
Dr. Lanzoni has been conducting research for an interdisciplinary history of empathy and has been preparing her work for publication. In November 2003, she presented a paper at the History of Science Society annual meeting in Cambridge, MA, entitled “The Prominence of Subjective Experience in Phenomenological Psychiatry” as part of a panel she organized on the topic: Subjectivity in Crisis: European Psychiatry and Patient Experience (1880–1920). 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” appeared in the journal Critical Inquiry in the fall of 2003. Another article, “Existential Encounter in the Asylum: Ludwig Binswanger’s 1935 Case of Hysteria,” will appear in the journal History of Psychiatry in September 2004. She has also submitted two manuscripts for review, one to Configurations, and the other to History of the Human Sciences, which tackle the methods and cultural meanings of existential approaches in psychiatry. In February, she gave the talk “Authenticity and the Contours of the Self” at the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science session entitled “The Ethics of Psychopharmacology.” In the fall of 2004, Lanzoni will begin a visiting assistant professorship in History and the History of Medicine at Yale University.

Alberto Martínez
Dr. Martínez, whose research over the past year at CPHS was mainly conducted at the affiliated Center for Einstein Studies with the kind assistance and guidance of John Stachel, is currently finishing a book manuscript entitled Neglected Science of Motion, A History of Kinematics from Ampère to Einstein. Martínez has also carried out research at the American Institute of Physics, History Center/Bohr Library, thanks to an AIP grant. Among the articles that Martínez has completed recently are: “Ritz, Einstein, and the Emission Hypothesis,” Physics in Perspective 6 (April 2004), 4-28; “Arguing about Einstein’s Wife,” Physics World 17, No. 4 (April 2004), 14; “Kinematic Subtleties in Einstein’s First Derivation of the Lorentz Transformations” American Journal of Physics, 72 (6) (June 2004), 790-798; “Material History and Imaginary Clocks: Poincaré, Einstein, and Galison on Simultaneity,” Physics in Perspective 6 (June 2004). Aside from Einstein studies, Martínez currently has a book manuscript under review on certain controversies in the history of numerical algebra. He also submitted “Euler’s ‘Mistake’: The Radical Product Rule in Historical Perspective” to The Mathematical Intelligencer, and he submitted an article on “Conventions and Inertial Frames” to the American Journal of Physics. Martínez also co-authored with S. S. Schweber the article “Field Theories,” forthcoming in the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Charles Scribner’s Sons/Thomson Gale). He has also been working as a Research Associate for the “Physics of Scale” branch of the History of Recent Science and Technology project at MIT’s Dibner Institute, as well as serving as a consultant and interviewee for a television program series for science teachers on “Theories of Matter,” produced by the Media Group of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Starting in the fall of 2004, Martínez will be teaching history of science at Caltech.

Lee McIntyre
Dr. McIntyre had one article appear in the last year: “Taking Underdetermination Seriously” in The Nordic Journal of Philosophy. Several other articles are forthcoming: “Intentionality, Pluralism and Redescription” (Philosophy of the Social Sciences), “Recent Work in the Philosophy of Chemistry” (Philosophical Review), and a book review of “Making Social Science Matter, by Bent Flybvjerg” (Philosophy of Science). Another article “Redescription and Descriptivism in the Social Sciences” is under review. Recently accepted for publication is an edited volume Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline, that will appear as part of Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, through Kluwer. Currently in preparation is an article “Emergence and Reductionism: Ontological or Epistemological Concepts.” McIntyre was promoted to Executive Director at the Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard University.

Enzo De Pellegrin
Dr. De Pellegrin currently oversees the transfer of materials from the Center to the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center (HGARC) and the establishment of the Robert S Cohen Collection in collaboration with the HGARC. At the beginning of the academic year, he organized and administered the establishment of a similar collection—on a much smaller scale—at the Institut Wiener Kreis in collaboration with the Center for Philosophy and History of Science and Prof. Robert S. Cohen. The materials concern documentary evidence of the activities of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science and correspondence regarding the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science. Initiated in 1960 as an interuniversity, interdisciplinary faculty group, the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science joined the European tradition of exchange among philosophers, social and natural scientists within the lively intellectual atmosphere of the Greater Boston area. The Colloquium served as a continuation of the Institute for the Unity of Science, itself a transplant from the Netherlands where it had been a graft from the Vienna Circle. Organizationally based at Boston University, at first within the Physics and Philosophy Departments, the Boston Colloquium was founded by a group of philosophers, physicists, and other scientists from several universities and non-academic laboratories in the Greater Boston area. In 1968, the Center for Philosophy and History of Science was established at Boston University, with the Colloquium as its principal activity. Dr. De Pellegrin's research focuses on Ludwig Wittgenstein and the history of analytical philosophy.

Thomas Winner
We regret to announce that our friend and colleague Thomas Winner passed away on April 20, 2004. Professor Winner was a highly respected linguist and philosopher of Slavic languages and literature. Born in Prague in 1917, he came to the States in 1939, where he continued his studies at Harvard and Columbia University. In 1966, he became professor of Slavic languages and comparative literature at Brown University after holding academic posts at the University of Michigan, Duke University, Johns Hopkins, and Columbia. He was author of three books: Oral Art and Literature of the Kazakhs of Russian Central Asia (1958), Chekhov and his Prose (1965), and his most recent, not-yet-published book on the Czech interwar avant garde. Professor Winner had a warm personality and an insightful mind. He leaves behind his wife Irene Portis-Winner and two daughters Ellen and Lucy.

Associated Faculty

Alisa Bokulich
Professor Alisa Bokulich was on leave this past year with a grant from the National Science Foundation to work on her book Quantum Flesh on Classical Bones: An Historical and Philosophical Reexamination of the Relationship between Classical and Quantum Mechanics. She also published two articles: “Niels Bohr’s Generalization of Classical Mechanics,” co-authored with Peter Bokulich, is forthcoming in Foundations of Physics, and “Open or Closed? Dirac, Heisenberg, and the Relation between Classical and Quantum Mechanics” is forthcoming in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 35 (3). Professor Bokulich organized and moderated the November 3rd session of the Boston Colloquium “Chirality in Kant and Contemporary Physics” and continued running the monthly Boston Area Philosophy of Physics Reading Group. Over the summer she participated in a workshop on Structuralism in Physics held in Florence, Italy and gave a paper on the Dirac-Heisenberg Debate at the 12th International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science held in Oviedo, Spain.
 
Peter Schwartz
Professor Schwartz completed his residency in Internal Medicine at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital this year and taught two courses and served as Director of Undergraduate Studies in BU’s Philosophy Department in the spring term. His paper, “An Alternative to Conceptual Analysis in the Function Debate,” appeared in The Monist in January. He presented “A Concept of Dysfunction in Clinical Medicine,” as part of a conference on Philosophical Issues in the Biomedical Sciences, in May at the Center for Ethics and Values in the Sciences, at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. In Fall 2004, he begins his appointment at Boston University Medical Center in which he will practice medicine and teach at the medical school half-time, while continuing as a half-time assistant professor in the Philosophy Department.
 
John Stachel
This year Dr. Stachel published a joint paper with Michel Janssen entitled “The Optics and Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” Preprint 265, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2004), submitted the invited paper “Structural Realism and Contextual Individuality” to a Festschrift edited by Yemima Ben-Menachem entitled Hilary Putnam (Cambridge University Press), which is now in press, and prepared another invited paper called “Structure, Individuality, and Quantum Gravity” for a collection on quantum gravity edited by Steven French to be published by Cambridge University Press. Dr. Stachel continues to read 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, The Practice of Relativity. Dr. Stachel supervised and was first reader for the doctoral dissertation of Tongdong Bai entitled “Philosophy and Physics: Action-at-a-distance and Locality” (Department of Philosophy, Boston University, 2003). He gave the first of a pair of talks commemorating the Einstein Centennial (1905–2005) at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science; the second will be given this coming December. He gave the talk “Structural Realism in the Physical and Social Sciences” to a student seminar on Structural Realism in the Philosophy Department.