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2004–2005 Annual Report

The Center for Philosophy and History of Science followed its traditional mission of offering a forum for graduate and postgraduate scholarly exchange concerning all aspects of the philosophy and history of science. Individual reports from the Center’s faculty, included below, demonstrate the breadth of research that the Center supports. The Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science hosted its 45th annual session, which included speakers such as Paul Churchland, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Warren Goldfarb, and Daniel Garber, and covered topics ranging from Turing and computationalism to structuralism in physics, from Marxist historiography to microscopy and telescopy, and from Wittgenstein’s inexpressible to public policy and scientific expertise. The Colloquium plays an important role in bringing together members of the Boston University community and scholars from around the world to foster exchange about the nature of science and its place in culture.

The Center introduced three new initiatives into its scholars program in 2004:

Exchange Program with The Cohn Institute for History of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. The Center launched an exchange program between faculty and graduate students from Tel Aviv University and Boston University in September, 2004. Prof. Gideon Freundenthal visited during the fall semester. He taught a graduate seminar on the German Jewish Enlightenment and spoke on Marxist historiography in the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science. Prof. Adi Ophir visited in the spring and taught a seminar in modern Continental political thought. Two graduate students, Guy Weinberger and Leon Jacobowitz, pursued their research under the primary direction of Prof. Daniel Dahlstrom and Prof. Peter Hawkins, respectively.

Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Center sponsored two postdoctoral fellows this year: Wendy Parker and Andrea Grignolio. Parker taught courses in applied ethics and philosophy of science and pursued research on the relationship between public policy and scientific expertise. Grignolio continued his research on the history of immunology and molecular biology.

Dissertation Fellowship. The Center sponsored two doctoral candidates from the Department of Philosophy this year: Charles Wolfe and Constantinos Mekios. Wolfe performed research on eighteenth-century compatibilist materialism under the supervision of Prof. Aaron Garrett; Mekios studied the philosophy of systems biology under the supervision of Prof. Alfred Tauber.

Center Members

Directors

Alfred I. Tauber
Director

Prof. Tauber completed his second book in the field of medical ethics, Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility. Scheduled for publication in the fall of 2005 by The MIT Press, this work extends his earlier Confessions of a Medicine Man (1999, The MIT Press). In Patient Autonomy, Dr. Tauber offers an extended examination of the tension between the politico-judicial standards of individual autonomy in the context of the clinical encounter, where patients are in an undeniable dependent status. Dr. Tauber presents, on the one hand, an argument for ‘relational’ selfhood, which reconfigures notions of self-governance, and on the other hand, he challenges physicians with the responsibility of patient advocacy, both from philosophical and practical perspectives. Other publications include “Medicine and the call for a moral epistemology,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 48:42-53, 2005; “Balancing medicine’s moral ledger: Trust and responsibility,” Responsibility (Boston University Studies in Philosophy and Religion) B. Darling-Smith (ed.) Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, forthcoming; “Medicine as a moral epistemology,” Multidisciplinary Approaches to Theory in Medicine R. Paton and L. McNamara (eds.) Elsevier, forthcoming, and Cooper, R. A. and Tauber, A. I. “New physicians for a new century,” Academic Medicine, forthcoming. His public lectures included “The Moral Calculus of Trustworthiness” at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, Trust in the Medical Setting, September 20, 2004, and “Taking Medical Ethics Seriously,” at Columbia University Center for Bioethics, College of Physicians and Surgeons, September 13, 2004.

In September, Prof. Cohen lectured in Vienna and Prague for the Symposium in Memory of Philipp Frank, Vienna-Prague-Boston, on the topics “Philipp Frank in the Vienna Circle” and “Causality and Its Limits.” The lectures were delivered at the Institut Wiener Kreis and the Erwin Schrödinger Institut and at the Research Center for History of the Sciences and Humanities, Czech Academy of Science. In April, Cohen gave two more lectures at the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Florida: “Causality and Its Limits: The Work of Philipp Frank 1907-1931-2005” and “Beyond Frank: Retribution and Causality.” Cohen published his edited and translated work “Otto Neurath’s Economic Writings: Selections 1904-1945” (ed. and trans. with Thomas Uebel, Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht/Boston/London, Vienna Circle Collection, vol. 23). In addition, Cohen continued to prepare the Robert S. Cohen Archive, which is housed in the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at BU and, in part, at the Institute of the Vienna Circle at the University of Vienna. The archive includes records of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science 1960-1990 and the several-book series (1) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 1-220, (2) Vienna Circle Collection, vol. 1-23, and (3) Studies in the History of Modern Science, vol. 1-17.

Ms. Daugherty continued work on her doctoral dissertation entitled “Symmetries and Principled Modeling in the History of Phase Transitions.” The body of the dissertation consists of historical essays on the modeling of phases and phase transitions; the first and last chapters frame the historical essays within the philosophical context of recent discussions of modeling as a scientific practice distinct from that of fundamental theorizing (e.g., Models as Mediators, Dappled World, Explaining Science, Science Without Laws). She argues that modeling practices are generally nontheoretic (in the sense that they are not derived from fundamental theory) and yet principled or rule-governed rather than ad hoc. Hence, modeling is a practice “autonomous” from fundamental theorizing that has principles of its own; these principles require examination if a philosophy of disciplines dominated by modeling such as condensed matter physics is to be had.

Visiting Professors

Gideon Freudenthal
Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University

During his stay in Boston (September-December 2004) Gideon Freudenthal completed one paper and continued working on a long term study of the philosophy of Salomon Maimon.  On October 14, 2004, Freudenthal lectured at the Boston Colloquium on “Boris Hessen's Marxist Historiography of Science.” On the basis of this lecture he completed during his stay a paper "The Hessen-Grossman Thesis: An Attempt at Rehabilitation" which will appear in Perspectives on Science 2005 (vol. 13, No. 2, pp. 166-193). Freudenthal also continued his extensive study into the philosophy of geometry of Salomon Maimon (1753-1800) and his critique of Kant. The core of this critique is Kant's notion of construction. Maimon's claimed that the definition of a geometrical entity does not imply a rule of its construction and hence that the construct cannot be shown to satisfy the definition. The core of Kant's philosophy is thus cast in doubt. It is not yet clear whether the essay will be independently published or form part of a book on Maimon's philosophy of mathematics (including also arithmetic, algebra, and ars inveniendi).

Peter Keating
Visiting Professor, University of Montreal

Peter Keating worked on the history of clinical cancer trials in the United States. During his stay in Boston he was able to gain access to members of the Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group, the world’s largest cooperative oncology group whose members kindly consented to interviews and provided documents. He presented four papers: Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio, “Animal Models, Human Trials and Anti-cancer Drugs,” presented at the 4S-EASST Conference; “Public Proofs: Science, Technology and Democracy,” presented in Paris, August 25-28, 2004; Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio, “Cancer Clinical Trials: The Emergence and Development of a New Style of Practice,” presented at Cancer in the Twentieth Century: A Workshop, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda), 15-17 November 2004; Alberto Cambrosio and Peter Keating, “Cancer Clinical Trials: New Style of Research, New Forms of Risk,” presented at Catastrophes and Health: Risk Perception between History and Actuality, University of Geneva, January 27-29, 2005; Peter Keating, “Biomedicine and Regulatory Objectivity”, paper presented at Human Bodies, Health Care Technologies and Places: 21st Century Practices and Scholarship, Annual Interdisciplinary Workshop, University of Toronto, April 14 & 15, 2005. He also published a paper: Alberto Cambrosio, Daniel Jacobi and Peter Keating, “Arguing with Images: Pauling’s Theory of Antibody Formation”, Representations, 89, 2005, pp.94-130.

Adi Ophir
Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University

During my stay in Boston (January–May 2005) I finished work on a revised French translation of an essay (co-authored with Ariella Azoulay) on simulation as a form of knowledge and power in Israeli politics during the Oslo period. I also completed the editorial preparation for my forthcoming book The Order of Evils (New York, Zone Books, 2005) and wrote the two first chapters of my new book on ontological and epistemological aspects of political power, to be published by the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. This latest work will consist of two parts. The first is an attempt to profit from a critical borrowing of concepts from some continental political thinkers (Karl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Michael Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière) in order to question systematically the spatio-temporal continuity and seemingly transcendent unity of modern political power and the role of the concept of sovereignty in the production of such unity and continuity. The second part will consist of rethinking the boundaries of the political and the nature of political action in light of the critique of political power achieved in the first part.

Edvin Schei
Visiting Professor, University of Bergen

Dr. Schei is a physician with a special interest in ethics and medical philosophy. During his stay in Boston (September 2004-June 2005), he worked on the tension between scientific and phenomenological approaches in clinical practice and its implications for medical ethics. He is compiling a book on virtue ethics and clinical practice in family medicine. A paper entitled “Doctoring as leadership: The power to heal” has been submitted to a journal. A chapter on shame as a barrier to medical help-seeking will appear in a Norwegian anthology in 2006. In April, Schei lectured in the Bioethics Society at Boston University, and at the Boston Colloquium, on “Doctoring as leadership,” discussing autonomy, paternalism and ethics of care within the frame of the clinical encounter. In June, Schei lectured on “The power of goodness” at the University of Bergen.

Visiting Scholars

Leon Jacobowitz
Visiting Scholar, Tel Aviv University

By the end of his first semester at BU, Mr. Jacobowitz completed a master’s thesis on Dante’s angelology for the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University, and he is currently in the final stages of converting two chapters of that thesis into publications. During his stay in Boston, Jacobowitz met with various local Dante scholars, including Prof. Peter Hawkins of Harvard University, Prof. Rachel Jacoff of Wellesley College, who will acknowledge Jacobowitz’s assistance in her upcoming publication, Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta of Yale University, Profs. Klepper and Lobel of Religion Studies at BU, Prof. Robert Pinsky of the English Department, Prof. Mormando of Boston College, Prof. Lino Pertile of Harvard, and Prof. Susan Einbinder of Hebrew Union College. Jacobowitz audited two courses at BU: Dante’s Inferno and Dante’s Purgatorio and Paradiso with Prof. Denis Costa of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature. He attended the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, which provided him with the opportunity to consult with Prof. Kenneth Seeskin of Northwestern University and Prof. Josef Stern of Chicago University regarding Maimonides’ astronomy. Jacobowitz’s readings during this academic year included medieval Hebrew literature (Book of Tahkemoni, Book of Delight and Medieval Jewish poetry) and non-Jewish literature of the same period (El Poema de Mio Cid, La Chanson de Roland, poetry of the Stilnovisti etc.), which provided him with topics for two future articles, one comparing Dante’s perception of the connection between the intellectual faculties and the physical body with those of Ibn Zabarah (Book of Delight) and Al-Harizi (Book of Tahkemoni) and the other analyzing Dante’s philosophy of science.

Guy Weinberger
Visiting Scholar, Tel Aviv University

During his stay at BU, Mr. Weinberger completed a research project that aims to elucidate Walter Benjamin’s Metaphysics of Language (1913-1930) by emphasizing its phenomenological elements, in general, and its relationship with Edmund Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction,” in particular. This challenging project made an important contribution to the interpretative corpus, because Benjamin’s previous interpreters had depicted only the Kabala and Platonic metaphysics as factors that molded Benjamin’s perception, a characterization that did not shed light on Benjamin’s affinity toward phenomenology. Weinberger also wrote a proposal for his doctoral dissertation in which he will examine Martin Heidegger’s notion of “deconstruction” (der abbau) in light of Benjamin’s (1892-1940) concepts of “criticism” and “translation” (ubersetzen). The common denominator in this comparison is their affinity toward the phenomenological school and the adoption of Edmund Husserl’s method of phenomenological reduction. This research will be the first to confront these two thinkers’ philosophies.

Postdoctoral Fellows

Andrea Grignolio

Since Dr. Grignolio joined the Center in January 2005, he has revised his doctoral dissertation Information and Selection. Informational Models and the Origin of Clonal Selection Theory in Immunology of the 1950s. In April, he successfully defended his dissertation and obtained his doctorate in History of Science at the University of Bari (Italy). On May 6th he gave a talk at BU’s teleology workshop on the Aristotelian legacy in interpreting the DNA code entitled “Teleology and Determinism in Early Molecular Biology.” During the same time period, Dr. Grignolio has prepared a talk and two articles. The talk, entitled “Historical Reassessment of the Theoretical Genesis of Clonal Selection Theory,” has been accepted by the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology for presentation at the meeting in Guelph, Ontario, July 13-17, 2005. One of his articles is focused on the role played by information theory and metaphor in the theoretical debate on the nature of the antibody formation mechanisms, and the other deals with a revisionist historical reconstruction of the theoretical merits of the clonal selection theory.

Wendy Parker

Dr. Wendy Parker engaged in both teaching and research as a postdoctoral fellow in the Center. She taught Environmental Ethics in the fall term and Philosophy of Science in the spring term. She continued her research on computer simulation modeling, revising chapters of her dissertation in preparation for publication; one chapter is currently under review at a journal. She presented "A Philosophical Look at Computer Simulation Modeling" in March at MIT as part of the Climate Seminar Series there. Dr. Parker also began a new project on the topic of expert scientific assessment and gave the talk, "Philosophy for Science for Policy: Scientific Uncertainty in the IPCC Assessments," in the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science in May. In addition, she finished work on an historical project concerning rainfall measurement in the 19th century; her paper, "The Case of the Missing Rain: Real Results, Artifacts, and Telling the Difference," will appear in a forthcoming edited volume published by MIT Press in the Dibner Institute Studies in the History of Science and Technology series.

Dissertation Fellows

Constantinos Mekios

During the 2004/05 academic year, Mr. Mekios formulated a dissertation project in the philosophy of biology. As suggested by its preliminary title, “Approaching Organisms as Systems: A Critical View of the Potential and Limitations of Systems Biology,” the focus of the dissertation will be on methodological issues pertaining to the emerging field of Systems Biology. In April 2005, Mekios successfully defended the prospectus for his dissertation and is expected to complete the project by the summer of 2006. Earlier this year, he presented his views on the philosophically relevant aspects of systems biology at the graduate student colloquium of the Philosophy Department. At the July 2005 meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology at Guelph, Ontario, Mekios spoke on the role of teleological concepts within General System Theory.

Charles Wolfe

During the 2004/05 academic year, Mr. Wolfe submitted two out of four chapters of his doctoral dissertation entitled “Locating Mind in the Causal World: Anthony Collins and the Radical Enlightenment.” Between October 2004 and May 2005 Wolfe co-organized a workshop on teleology at which approximately fifteen papers were given (http://people.bu.edu/teleolog/). In September 2004, he gave a talk on the status of Diderot’s naturalism in the context of the natural historical tradition at the “Nature and Culture in the Enlightenment” conference in Helsinki, Finland. In May 2005, he gave a presentation at the Paris Seminaire de Monique David-Menard “L’individuation et l’impersonnel” entitled “Une theorie materialiste du soi,” which includes material that will appear in the final chapter of his dissertation. In July 2005, Wolfe chaired a panel on teleology (and presented) at the meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology, at the University of Guelph, Canada. (http://www.ishpssb.org/ocs/schedule.php).

During 2004/05, Dr. Aczel wrote Descartes’ Secret Notebook, which will be published by Random House in the fall. The book is the product of six years of research on Descartes’ contributions to mathematics, and it is based on previously unpublished research that Aczel performed in France on Descartes’ hidden work from the 1620s. At the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, Aczel met Prof. Kenneth Manders of the University of Pittsburgh, whose research is directly related to Aczel’s; that interaction contributed directly to the introduction of new material into Aczel’s book.

Ariella Azoulay

While at BU (January to July, 2005), Prof. Azoulay worked on her book “Citizens of Disaster.” The book focuses on two population groups whose vulnerability and, in times of emergency, cataclysm have been made invisible and whose calls for help have been silenced due to their “state of exception:” the Palestinian non-citizens of Israel and women in Western societies. During these months, she finished two chapters relating to the state of women: “The Citizens of Disaster” and “The Missing Image.” She has presented her work at MIT, Columbia University (Program for Curatorial Studies), The New School (The Vera List Center for Art and Politics), and Bard College (Program from Human Rights) and benefited from the response of her colleagues there.

As Secretary General of the European Desalination Society, Editor in Chief of the journal Desalination (published by Elsevier B.V., Amsterdam), and President of the International Federation of Science Editors, Dr. Balaban has continued to pursue effective processing and management of water supplies worldwide. Her efforts include lecturing, editing, and organizing numerous conferences and committees; the year’s events included June 7–10, 2004, IWA specialty conference on Water Environment—Membrane Technology,Seoul, Korea, International Advisory Committee; June 16–18, Fouling and Critical Flux: Theory and Applications, Lappeenranta, Finland; July 15­–17, Coordinator of course on: Thermal desalination processes L’Aquila University and European Desalination Society, L’Aquila, Italy; August 28–September 3, World Renewable Energy Congress VIII, Renewable Energy Option, Security, Innovation and Sustainability, Denver, CO, Member of Steering Committee; September 19–24, IWA 4th World Water Congress, Marrakech, Morocco; September 26–28, Seminar in Environmental Science and Technology; Evaluation of Alternative Water Treatment Systems for Obtaining Safe Water Organized by the University of Salerno with support of NATO Science Programme Fisciano (SA), Italy, Editor of proceedings; September 28–October 1, Euromembrane 2004, Hamburg, Germany, Session chairman; October 9–12, Second Israel-Palestinian International Conference on Water and Life in the Middle East, Rome; October 10–13, IFSE 12 12th Conference of the International Federation of Science Editors Future Trends in Science Editing and Publishing, Bringing Science to Society, President of the Federation, Merida, Mexico; November 15­–17, International Water Association--European Desalination Society, Membranes in Drinking and Industrial Water Production, L’Aquila, Italy; December 18–19, Third Workshop European Desalination Society and Water Science and Technology Association, Future Research and Capacity Building in Desalination, Bahrain; November 29–December 2, Third EDS-WSTA workshop, Research and Capacity Building, Bahrain; March 16–17, 2005, Aachen Membrane Colloquium, Aachen, Germany; April 19–21, UNESCO and the Ministry of Water and Environment of Yemen Regional Technical Workshop, Yemen; May 22–25, European Desalination Society conference Desalination and the Environment, La Spezia, Italy.

Robert Briscoe

Dr. Briscoe spent the 2004/05 academic year teaching in the Department of Philosophy at Tufts University and writing his “Individualism, Externalism, and Idiolectical Meaning” forthcoming in Synthese. In February, he accepted a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Loyola University, New Orleans, where he will begin teaching in the fall. Briscoe is currently working on Wittgenstein’s account of logical generality in the Tractatus and its importance for the development of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical considerations of linguistic meaning and understanding. This summer, in addition to preparing a course on epistemology and the philosophy of perception to be given at Loyola in the fall, he will also pursue research on the significance of inattentional and change blindness experiments for current debates on “qualia” and visual consciousness. On November 22, 2004, Briscoe moderated a session of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science entitled “Wittgenstein and the Inexpressible,” with Avner Baz, Juliet Floyd, and Warren Goldfarb participating. In January 2006, he will give a talk titled “Vehicles of Perception” at a BCPS session on the legacy of J.J. Gibson, with Ruth Millikan and Alva Noë participating.

During 2004/05, Dr. Lin worked on a new book under contract with World Science on the methodological issues of political science, and she expects to complete that book over the summer. Lin is currently expanding an essay on poverty and human rights, which she presented at the Social Science School at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in March 2005, into a book, contracted with Palgrave in London. The book aims at a historical and philosophical argument for ending global poverty. Her articles around the themes of development and modernity have continued to appear in scholarly journals in Chinese and she has also been involved in organizing two political philosophy international conferences in China this year.

This year Dr. Gorelik published “The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist's Path to Freedom” (Oxford University Press,  2005, 406 pp., with Antonina W. Bouis). A revised Russian  edition of  this book “Andrei Sakharov. Nauka i svoboda” was published in Moscow (Vagrius, 2004, 608 pp.). He continued a major project of a social biography of Lev Landau, “The Soviet Life of Lev Landau and his Friends.” He presented his paper “Circulating Top-Secret Knowledge for the History of the H-bomb” at the 5th British-North American Joint Meeting of the BSHS, CSHPS, and HSS, Halifax, Nova Scotia, August 7, 2004. He published an article "Leonid Mandelshtam and his school" in Vestnik Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk [Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences] 2004, ‡‚ 10.

In December, Dr. Gourko successfully defended her doctoral dissertation entitled “‘Divine Onomatology:’ Naming God in Imyaslavie, Symbolism, and Deconstruction” in the Department of Religion at Boston University. In May, she signed a contract with Econompress of Minsk to publish her dissertation as a book entitled “Divine Onomatology” (published in summer-fall 2005). Dr. Gourko presented papers at two conferences this year: one entitled “Gadamer and Arendt on Karl Marx” at the Annual Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Boston, and the other entitled “Knowledge and Religion: Derrida's Radical Reinterpretation” at the fourth Russian Philosophy Congress, Moscow.

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," 2005.  To complete this work, she is working with software engineers to develop the necessary tools.  When this methodological work is completed, she expects that it will be of heuristic value to the social sciences, including education, and to psychological medicine.  She has also been working on an ethnographic analysis of excellent elementary school classrooms in order to delineate factors that keep students from being lost in the classroom. The study is based on close observation of classroom operations and will look at contemporary educational psychology in view of developments in the field of systems neuroscience.

Stefania Jha

This year Dr. Jha continued her work on the epistemology of Eugene Wigner, which aims to verify and flesh out his claim that he learned his philosophy from Michael Polanyi. Jha read all Wigner's relevant philosophical essays in chronological order, matched them up with correspondence between Wigner and Polanyi, and traced Wigner’s philosophical development and learning. She found that Wigner's claim seems to be only very partially correct in substance and that Wigner probably did not understand Polanyi's concept of tacit knowing. Jha is currently integrating recently acquired Wigner correspondence into the analysis of Wigner's claim, of which she is skeptical, and writing up the final version of the study for publication.

Dr. Emilie Kutash presented a paper at the International Neoplatonic Society in Liverpool in June on time and eternity in Proclus which will be published in an anthology. She presented a commentary on the papers on Neoplatonic ethics at a panel at American Philological Association conference in Boston in January. She wrote the introduction to Barnes and Noble’s new edition of Cyril Bailey’s translation of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things which is now published. Her book on Proclus In and Out of Context is almost competed. She presented a paper on transcendence this June at ISNS and a paper on late antiquity philosophers and Talmudic scholars at Villanova in October. The paper presented last year at the American Philological Association “What did Plato Read?” is being considered for publication as well by the International Plato Society’s web journal.

Over the past year, Susan Lanzoni has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of the History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. She has taught courses including “Bodies and Machines in the Sciences;” “Making the Modern Mind: History of Psychology and Psychiatry;” “Intersubjectivity in the Mind Sciences;” and a course on Methods and Literature in the History of Science. She has also continued publishing on the topic of history of psychiatry and philosophy, including the publications: “Existential Encounter in the Asylum: Ludwig Binswanger’s 1935 Case of Hysteria” History of Psychiatry, 15 (3) September, 2004, pp. 285-304; “Diagnosing Modernity: Mania and Authenticity in Swiss Existential Psychiatry” Configurations Vol. 12 (1) Winter 2004; and “The Enigma of Subjectivity: Ludwig Binswanger’s Existential Anthropology of Mania” History of the Human Sciences, May 2005, Vol. 18, no. 2. She gave a seminar presentation on “Empathy, Aesthetics and Psychology” in the course entitled “Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory: Affect, Technology, Value” in the German Studies Department, Princeton University, March 7, 2005.  She will continue teaching at Yale for the coming year 2005-2006.

Francis Longworth

Francis Longworth continued his work on the metaphysics of causation as a Research Fellow in the Center. He presented “Causation, Counterfactuals and the Preemption Problem” at Harvard in March, and “Causation as a Cluster Concept” at MIT in May. His Ph.D. dissertation “Causation and Pluralism” will be submitted to the University of Pittsburgh next year.

Lydia Mayer

In the fall of 2004, Dr. Mayer taught the Department of Philosophy’s introductory medical ethics course. She guest lectured on medical ethics at Robert Wagenar's Rehabilitation Ph.D. Research Seminar and gave a talk entitled “What Ails Dignity” at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science in the spring. Her manuscript, “Public Health Education Reform in Context: A Critique of The Institute of Medicine’s Report, ‘Who Will Keep the Public Healthy?’” was accepted for publication by the Journal of Public Health Management. Mayer participated as recording secretary for the Boston Academic Bioethics Roundtable Group and as a guest at Harvard’s Monthly Clinical Ethics Consortium Forum.

Dr. McIntyre published “Intentionality, Pluralism, and Redescription” in Philosophy of the Social Sciences, as well as two book reviews, “Recent Work in the Philosophy of Chemistry” in The Philosophical Review and “Making Social Science Matter” in Philosophy of Science. Several other projects have been accepted and are forthcoming: with Eric Scerri (UCLA) and Davis Baird (University of South Carolina), Dr. McIntyre is co-editor of Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline, which will soon appear as volume 242 in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, with Springer Publishers. Also forthcoming is one article “Redescription and Descriptivism in the Social Sciences” (Behavior and Philosophy) and one book review “The Objects of Social Science” (Philosophy of the Social Sciences). In October 2005, Dr. McIntyre moderated a colloquium entitled “Making Molecules Matter” under the auspices of CPHS, featuring presentations by Nalini Bhushan, Roald Hoffman, and Jeffrey Ramsey. The papers from this event will then appear in a special issue of Synthese to be devoted to the Philosophy of Chemistry, along with Dr. McIntyre’s own paper “Emergence and Reductionism in Chemistry: Ontological or Epistemological Concepts?” Current projects include an article tentatively entitled “What Can Medicine Teach the Social Sciences” and a new book. After four years in academic administration at Harvard University, Dr. McIntyre has now returned to teaching as a Lecturer at Simmons College and at Harvard Extension School.

Enzo De Pellegrin

Dr. De Pellegrin has continued to prepare an archival transfer of the Center’s historical material to the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. 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 the development of logical positivism in the United States. De Pellegrin is 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).

Peter Schwartz

Dr. Schwartz was appointed a Core Faculty Member of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics and Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine. He continues to carry out research and writing on topics in bioethics and philosophy of science, currently focusing on the analysis of ideas of disease, health, and risk in medicine. Two publications are forthcoming: 1) “Decision and Discovery in Defining ‘Disease’,” in H. Kincaid and J. McKitrick, Establishing Medical Reality: Essays in the Metaphysics and Epistemology of Biomedical Science (Dordrecht: Springer), and 2) “Defending the Distinction between Treatment and Enhancement,” in American Journal of Bioethics. In November 2004, he presented “Demarcating Dysfunction: Natural Selection, Design, and Drawing a Line,” as part of a conference on Metaphysics and Medicine at the University of Buffalo.

Alisa Bokulich

Professor Bokulich recently received a contract from Cambridge University Press for her book Intertheoretic Relations: Reexamining the Relationship between Classical and Quantum Mechanics.  In November she presented a paper entitled "Heisenberg Meets Kuhn: Closed Theories and Paradigms" at the nineteenth biennial meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association held in Austin Texas.  She organized a successful session of the Boston Colloquium this year on "Structural Approaches in the Philosophy of Physics" and presented her current work on "A Structural Approach to Intertheoretic Relations."  In February she delivered an invited paper at Western Michigan University on "Ontic Vagueness and Quantum Entanglement."  This year Professor Bokulich applied for and was awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Conference Grant, which will fund a two-day, thirteen-speaker session of the Boston Colloquium next year on "The Foundations of Quantum Information and Entanglement." 

John Stachel