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2006–2007 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 47th annual session, which continues to play 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. This year the lecture series featured 40 speakers, including Ron Giere, Philip Kitcher, Noretta Koertge, James Lennox, Michael Lynch, John Norton, Alex Rosenberg, Joseph Rouse, John Stachel, John Zammito, as well as the entire Department of Philosophy at Boston University for a unique panel discussion on Whither Philosophy? Colloquia topics ranged from causation in biology and physics, assessing contemporary science studies, relevance of Aristotle’s biology in the modern era, civic and ethical values in science, and the Teller-Oppenheimer controversy.

Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Center sponsored one postdoctoral fellows this year: Corine Pelluchon taught medical ethics in the Department of Philosophy and completed various research projects and articles for publication.

Dissertation Fellowship. The Center sponsored two doctoral candidates from the Department of Philosophy this year: Gal Kober and Constantinos Mekios. Kober formulated a dissertation project in the philosophy of biology; Mekios studied the philosophy of systems biology. Both worked under the supervision of Prof. Alfred Tauber.

Center Members

Directors

Alfred I. Tauber
Director

Prof. Tauber completed a monograph entitled, Science and its Quest for Meaning. This text offers a historical and philosophical account of post-positivist descriptions of science with four specific goals: 1) to avoid the excesses and dogmatism of either extreme of Science Wars commentary; 2) to present a conception of “reason,” which opens an avenue out of the interminable debates within science studies about the nature of objectivity and neutrality; 3) to place science firmly within humanistic concerns that have too often been ignored; and 4) to offer a conceptual approach for understanding science as an evolving relationship between facts and the values that govern the discovery/manufacture of facts and their applications. This latter issue spans the political roles of contemporary science to the individual integration of scientific knowledge with personal knowledge. During his Spring semester sabbatical in Israel, he began a new project concerning the philosophical structure of psychoanalysis; a book is planned, tentatively titled, Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher. He also continued scientific collaborations at Tel Aviv University on the regulation and organization of complex bacterial systems and in a new appointment, he consulted on medical curriculum reform at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center. During the past year, Dr. Tauber spoke at 1) the White Coat Ceremony, McGill Faculty of Medicine, October 6, 2006; 2) “Unique Moral Challenges of Treating the New Immigrant,” Grand Rounds, Jay Weiss Center for Social Medicine and Health Equity, University of Miami School of Medicine, December 12, 2006; papers delivered: 3) "The Immune System in its Ecological Context," at The Making up of Organisms: Mapping the Future of Biological Models and Theories, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, June 10, 2006; 4) "Broadening Science Studies: Seeking a Moral Epistemology Future," presented at New Directions in Biology Studies, workshop at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, July 29, 2006; and 5) “Reclaiming Science for Philosophy,” Re-Assessing the Science Wars: Where Are Science Studies Now, and Where Are They Going Tomorrow?, Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, February 2, 2007.

Robert Cohen
Director Emeritus

TBA

Peter Bokulich
Associate Director

Professor P. Bokulich joined the Center as Associate Director in September, 2005. He is principally involved in planning the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science and overseeing its operations. During the past year, he presented “On Definitions and Measurements of Quantum Field Values,” at the 32 nd Annual Philosophy of Science Conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia; “Bohr’s Account of Waves and Particles: Complementarity vs. Duality” at the Sixth Congress of HOPOS, the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, in Paris; “Causal Properties and Physical Dynamics,” at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science; “Putting Zombies to Rest: The Role of Dynamics in Reduction” at the University of South Carolina; and “The Domains of Physics: From Brains to Black Holes” at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He published “Does Black Hole Complementarity Answer Hawking’s Information Loss Paradox?” in the journal Philosophy of Science. He is currently editing a volume of the Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science series with Professor Alisa Bokulich on the topic of Scientific Structuralism. He has been contracted to author (with Eric Curiel) the “Singularities and Black Holes” entry of the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Professor Bokulich also moderated several sessions of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, and was a panelist in the session “Whither Philosophy? A Boston University Department of Philosophy Roundtable Discussion.”

Visiting Professors

Anat Biletzki
Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University

Professor Biletzki will be at the Department of Philosophy (as Findlay Visiting Professor) and at the Center (as Visiting Professor) for the whole of 2006. During the spring semester (2006) she worked on an article for the Routledge Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies (eds. Charles Webel and Johan Galtung), titled “The Language-Game of Peace”. In May she presented a somewhat more localized version of the paper in a talk – “’Peace’ as a language-game of the 21 st century” – given at the International Conference on Ethics and Politics held in Crete. Her work in Boston will be centered on the philosophical foundations of Human Rights in general (on which she will be teaching a graduate seminar in the fall 2006 semester), and the implications of this philosophical perspective for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She is also completing a manuscript on “De-transcendentalizing Religion: Hobbes and Wittgenstein”, which, although nominally different from the on-going research on the philosophy of Human Rights, is not unconnected: religion is one of the factors which can thwart the universalism demanded by human rights. Hobbes and Wittgenstein might provide a linguistic and communal response to its challenges.


Postdoctoral Fellows

Corine Pelluchon

During her fellowship, Dr. Corine Pelluchon taught medical ethics both for undergraduate and graduate students in the Department of Phiulosophy. She wrote an article on “The Limits of Human Rights in Bioethics” (submitted for publication) in which she showed that human rights, although necessary, are not sufficient to provide adequate guidance both at the micro-level of the patient-physician relationship and at the macro-level of policy decision-making. She also intended a critique of modern humanism and explored in the work of H. Jonas, C. Lévi-Strauss and E. Lévinas the possibility of an alternative to the humanism of the current declarations of human rights. She delivered several lectures ( NIH, Binghamton University, BU seminar for graduate students) on the limits of procedural ethics in bioethics (at the three levels of judgment in medical ethics: the patient-physician relationship; the deontological level of codes and the level of policy decision-making where she explored the question of the allocation of health care resources in the USA). She is currently writing for Perspective on Political Science another article on the critique of autonomy and on the necessity to supplementing any rights-based approach by virtue ethics. In March 2007, she published in Commentaire (N° 117) a review of A. Tauber’s book, Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility: “Ethique et médecine: au-delà de la distinction entre faits et valeurs”. She had begun a book in French before her arrival in the USA and is currently rewriting the introduction in English: The Defect of Autonomy. Bioethics in Light of Political Philosophy. Since she was awarded the Prize François Furet 2006 for her book ( Leo Strauss : une autre raison, d’autres Lumières, Vrin, 2005), she gave two lectures in France on Leo Strauss: “Cosmopolitanism, Humanitarianism and Homogeneous State in Leo Strauss: A Critique of Modern Ideals And of Contemporary Politics” ( including the American foreign policy)”, May the 2d, CLESID-CERPHI, ENS, Lyon; forthcoming in Commentaire; “Religion and Politics in L. Strauss”, Science Po, Paris. She also delivered a paper at the University of Chicago, Workshop of the Committee on Social Thought, on May the 21 st: “Strauss’s Critique of Enlightenment: An Answer to Heidegger”, submitted for publication to Interpretation.

Dissertation Fellows

Constantinos Mekios

During the 2006-2007 academic year, Constantinos Mekios completed and successfully defended his doctoral dissertation titled "Approaching Organisms as Systems: A Critical Study of the Method of 'Systems Biology'." He then taught full-time at Stonehill College where he held the position of instructor of philosophy. Mekios is currently working on a paper to be presented at the meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), (July, 2007). The paper considers the significance of recent applications of systems biology for evaluating claims regarding the scientific autonomy of biology. In 2007-2008, Mekios will continue teaching at Stonehill College where he was offered a one year assistant professor position in the department of philosophy.

Gal Kober

During the academic year 2006-2007 Gal Kober continued writing her doctoral dissertation, entitled ‘Biology Without Species: A Solution to the Species Problem’. In July 2006 she attended the Future Directions in Biology Studies Workshop of the International Society for the History Philosophy and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), at the University of Indiana, Bloomington. There she co-led, with Corinne Bloch of The Cohn Institute for History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University, a discussion they had co-organized on “Determinism and Indeterminism in Biology”. In October 2006, Ms. Kober co-organized the session “Causation in Biology” in the two-day Causation in Biology and Physics event of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science. In November, she attended the biannual meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association and participated in the annual meeting of The Philosophy and Developmental Biology Working Group, in Vancouver. Later that month she also moderated the Philosophy of Science and Logic session in the “Whither Philosophy?” meeting in the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science series. In December, she gave a talk titled “What Evolves? Biology without Species” in the Boston University Department of Philosophy Graduate Students Presentation Series. In July 2007, Ms. Kober will be giving a talk titled Biology without Species in the Classification and Essentialism session, at the ISHPSSB Biannual Conference in Exeter, UK.

Dr. Aczel published The Artist and the Mathematician (Avalon Books), which concerns the relationship between modern art and mathematics, as well as the secret French mathematical group called Nicolas Bourbaki, which exerted its influence on much of mathematics in the early twentieth century. Aczel was interviewed about this book on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation Science Friday” by Ira Flatow. Throughout this academic year, Aczel has been working on his newest book, The Jesuit and the Skull, about the work of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the discovery of Peking Man in Zhoukoudian, China, in the 1920s. This book will be published in October 2007. Aczel’s 2005 book, Descartes’ Secret Notebook was published this year in French translation and was reviewed in France in Le Monde, L’Express, and Lire. The Italian translation of the same book was reviewed in the magazine L’Espresso by Umberto Eco. On December 5, 2006, Aczel’s article on his travels to research his books was published in The New York Times (“Frequent Flyer,” p. C7). On March 14, 2007, he was featured in an article on science and technology by Kevin Maney in USA Today (p. B3). On February 24-25, 2007, Aczel’s book review of The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O’Shea was published in The Wall Street Journal, and on April 15, 2007, another review of Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, was published in The Boston Globe (p. D5). On June 22, 2007, Aczel will deliver a lecture about his research on Teilhard de Chardin and Peking Man, by invitation, at the University of Udine, in Italy. And in June 18-21 he will attend the Euler Equation symposium in Aussois, France.

Miriam Balaban

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: Euromembrane, September 24-28, 2006 Giardini Naxos, Taormina (Messina), Italy - Editor of the proceedings Participant ; CIERTA, October 5-7, 2006, International Conference on Renewable Energies and Water Technologies, Roquetas de Mar, Almeria, Spain - Plenary lecturer on solar desalination; Watmed 3, November 1–3, 2006 , The third International Conference on Water Resources on the Medierranean Basin , Tripoli, Lebanon - Scientific committee ; The Arab Regional Solar Energy Conference, November 5–7, 2006 , Manama, Kingdom of Bahrain- Plenary lecturer ; Sharing Knowledge Across the Mediterranean (3), November 6–8, 2006 , International Center for Theoretical Physics, Trieste- Convener and chairman of a session on Sea Water Desalination ; European Desalination Society, April 22–25, 2007 , Desalination and the Environment , Halkidiki, Greece - Organizer, program chairman and proceedings editor.

Lin Chun

Dr. Lin Chun continues to teach and write in the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her book, The Transformation of Chinese Socialism (Duke University Press, 2006), has received very positive reviews and her current project on the methodological issues in political science will be complete by the end of 2007. She has written two articles on the debates over privatization and property rights for journal publication. She gave a keynote speech on development and sustainability concerning China at an international conference held in London and presented papers on China’s global position and the meaning of socialism and democracy in the 21 st century, respectively, in two other high profile meetings. She also published two book reviews.

Debra Daugherty

In addition to bringing her second child, Margaux Anaïs Hérant, into the world, Dr. Daugherty successfully defended her dissertation entitled "Elaborating the Crystal Concept: Scientific Modeling and Ordered Thermodynamic Phases" for the University of Chicago’s Committee for Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science. Dr. Daugherty is currently working up two chapters of her dissertation for publication as individual articles in the history of science. One essay treats nineteenth-century efforts emerging out of mineralogy to model polymorphic forms of crystals in terms of the concept of the "physical molecule;" the other looks at nineteenth-century approaches to modeling crystalline and liquid crystalline phases that took cues from German romantic biology.

Dr. Gorelik continued his major project on a social biography of Lev Landau, and he has written an article on Andrei Sakharov for the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Public lectures include the second part of his comparative research project on Soviet and American history of the H-Bomb "Edward Teller and realities of illusory worlds" at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, March 19, 2007. He gave several talks in Russia: "Secret Physics and Scientific Ethics", the Institute for History of Science and Technology (Moscow, June 1, 2006 ); " Science and life at the Dawn of  cGh-physics", Seminar on Quantum Gravity and Cosmology dedicated to the 100th birthday of Matvei Bronstein (St. Petersburg, Nov. 30 -  Dec 2  2006); "Lydia Chukovskaya and Matvei Bronstein: “Two cultures” or the tree of culture," Conference on the Centenary of Lydia Chukovskaya (Moscow, March 28, 2007 ).

Helena Gourko

Helena Gourko continues to work on theory of divine onomatology having completed a manuscript for publication in the USA (“Divine Onomatology: Naming God in Imyaslavie, Symbolism, and Deconstruction”.) Currently, she is exploring possibilities of its publication and contact various publishing houses. In 2007, Gourko published a book, Modal Methodology of David Zilberman, in Russian, and an article, “David Zilberman,” in The Newest Philosophical Dictionary.

This past year Dr. Greeley has continued her research into the neurodynamics of the emotional controls of attention in the cognitive generative learning process, the process that generates a strategy to find a solution to an open-ended problem.  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], and which will be of heuristic value to the social sciences, including education and psychological medicine.  Dr. Greeley is working on a book that will incorporate the contemporary systems neuroscience of Walter J. Freeman with contemporary educational philosophy and psychology. She continues to attend conferences and edit articles in the area of neuroscience and neurophilosophy.

Stefania Jha

This year Jha completed the publication process of the special issue Hungarian Studies on Imre Lakatos (Perspectives on Science, vol. 14, #3) on Lakatos’ philosophy of mathematics and science, showing new research by Hungarian philosophers and historians of science. The print issue of PoS appeared this spring. She continued her research on the historical-scientific context of the ‘flowering of Hungarian geniuses of science’ at the turn of the 19 th and beginning of the 20 th centuries. This led to an exploration of the flow of scientific and philosophical ideas from their central European centers ( Vienna, Berlin) toward the provinces, and the generative effect this had on European sciences, and the ferment this produced in a widening circle integrating knowledge of all kinds. Efforts at unification came with various emphases: the Unity of Science movement of the Vienna Circle, leaning toward empiricism explicitness and the ‘eliminaton’ of metaphysics; and the almost parallel movement ‘Unity of Knowledge Group’ organized by Michael Polanyi, which emphasized an integration of culture, psychology and humanities. Jha explored these movements by taking the thread of perception and concept-formation from the earliest writings of these movements and debates. An especially interesting find in this context was Mach’s philosophy of science, unrecognizable as the precursor of the Vienna Circle’s basic tenets: Mach tried to reconcile physics and psychology, and did numerous experiments on psycho-physiology. –The puzzle of perception was exposed by Jha’s study of the Polanyi-Wigner correspondence on the epistemology of quantum mechanics, specifically the ‘measurement problem’. The study resulted in a paper, now under revision in preparation for publication.

Lee McIntyre

Dr. McIntyre published several articles this year in support of his new book Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior which was released by MIT Press in the fall of 2006. One article, “The Dark Ages of Social Science,” appeared in The Humanist and another, with a similar title, appeared in TheTimes Literary Supplement. Dr. McIntyre also published two scholarly articles this year: “Emergence and Reduction in Chemistry: Ontological or Epistemological Concepts” and “The Philosophy of Chemistry: Ten Years Later,” both of which appeared in a special issue of the journal Synthese that was devoted to the philosophy of chemistry. A review of Eleonora Montuschi’s “The Objects of Social Science” appeared in the journal Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Forthcoming work includes an encyclopedia entry for the 2 nd edition of the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Dr. McIntyre continues to teach at Simmons College.

Associated Faculty

Alisa Bokulich

This past year Professor Bokulich presented her research in several venues, including the Sixth Congress of the International Society for the History and Philosophy of Science (HOPOS), the conference “Models and Simulations” held in Paris, and the Philosophy Departments at both the University of South Carolina and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She also had a paper accepted at the Philosophy of Science Association (PSA) Meeting held in Vancouver. She organized a session of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science on explanation in the limits of physics, in which she also delivered a paper, and was a panelist in the colloquium session “Whither Philosophy.” Her article “Can Classical Structures Explain Quantum Phenomena” was accepted for publication in the top journal British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. Her authored book Correspondences, Structures, and the Classical Limit: Reexamining the Relation between Classical and Quantum Mechanics will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. She is also working on two edited book projects, a volume co-edited with Professor Peter Bokulich on scientific structuralism in the series Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, and another volume co-edited with Professor Gregg Jaeger on the philosophical foundations of quantum information. Most significantly, Professor Bokulich was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure effective Fall 2007.

John Stachel

This year Prof. Stachel continued his research in a number of topics in general relativity, resulting in a number of publications, some on technical physics topics and others on more philosophically and historically oriented topics. These publications include: "The Hole Argument for Covariant Theories," (with Mihaela Iftime) GRG Journal General Relativity and Gravitation 38 : 1241-1252 (2006), electronic version at <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10714-006-0303-4>; "The First Two Acts," in J ü rgen Renn et al., eds., The Genesis of General Relativity, vol. 1, Einstein's Zurich Notebook: Introduction and Source (Berlin: Springer 2007) pp. 81- 111; "Hilbert's Foundation of Physics: From a Theory of Everything to a Constituent of General Relativity" (with J ü rgen Renn), in J ü gen Renn and Miatthias Schimmel, eds., The Genesis of General Relativity, vol 4, Gravitation in the Twilight of Classical Physics: The Promise of Mathematics (Berlin: Springer 2007), pp. 857-974; "The Story of Newstein: Or is Gravity Just Another Pretty Force?" in ibid., vol. 4, pp. 1041-1078; "Einstein's Intuition and the Post-Newtonian Approximation," in Hugo Garcia-Compe á n et al., eds, Topics in Mathematical Physics, General Relativity and Cosmology (Singapore: World Scientific 2006) pp.453-467; "Einstein on the Military Mentality, and Rotblatt on the Culture of Violence," in R. Braun et al. eds., Joseph Rotblatt: Visionary for Peace (Weinheim: Wiley-VCH Verlag 2007, pp. 241-244; "Prolegomena to any Future Quantum Gravity," in Daniele Oriti, ed., Approaches to Quantum Gravity (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P. 2008), 27 pp., to appear; review of Palle Yourgrau: "A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of G ödel and Einstein," 8 pp., Notices of the American Mathematical Society, to appear August 2007; "Heady Days in Princeton": Review of Steve Batterson: "Pursuit of Genius Flexner, Einstein and the Early Faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study," Nature 445: 263 (2007); "'What Song the Syrens Sang' How Did Einstein Discover Special Relativity?," reprinted in E = Einstein His Life His Thought, and His Influence on Our Culture ` (New York: Sterling Pub. 2006), pp. 157-172; "Albert Einstein: A Man for the Millenium?," reprinted in Albert Einstein Century International Conference Paris France 18-22 July 2005, AIP Conference Proceedings, vol. 861 (Melville, NY: American Institute of Physics, 2006), pp. 211-243. Stachel also gave several invited talks on his work: "Background Independence and Quantum Gravity," Cosmology Seminar (University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, February 20, 2007); "The Search for Quantum Gravity," Physics Colloquium (Lehigh University, March 22, 2007); "Einstein's Odyssey: From Special to General Relativity," Boston Colloquium for Philosophy and History of Science" (March 5, 2007).

Mihaela Iftime

Dr. Iftime continued independent research activities in mathematics, as well as her collaboration with John Stachel, resulting in a number of articles including "The Hole Argument for Covariant Theories," (with John Stachel) GRG Journal General Relativity and Gravitation 38 : 1241-1252 (2006), electronic version at <http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10714-006-0303-4>; "On the (gauge-)natural theory of gravitation and the space of geometries," submitted to J. Geometry & Physics; "Gauge and the Hole Argument," submitted to J. Mathematical Physics; and "The HoleArgument, Physical Events and the Superspace,", to appear in the proceedings of the sixth International Meeting on Integrable systems and QFT at Peyresq, ed J. Kouneiher. She gave several invited talks "The Hole Argument, Physical Events and the Superspace," at the Integrable systems and quantum field theory, (Peyresq, France, June 10-17, 2006); "Principle Bundles and the Hole Argument " at the CIMPA-CIMAT School on Vector Bundles, (Guanajuato, Mexico, November 27-December 8, 2006); and" On (gauge-)natural theories and the Superspace," at the Quantum Issues in Space-Time seminar, (Univeriteit Utrecht, Holland, January 11, 2007). She also attended a number of conferences: Current Developments in Mathematics, Harvard University, November 17-19, 2006; Stochastic Processes in Mathematical Physics, Firenze, Italy, June 19-23, 2006; Mathematical Sciences Research Institute: Modern Mathematics, Tampa, Florida, October 25 - 26, 2006; The 14th SCGAS, University of California at San Diego, February 10-11, 2007; Inverse Problems in Stochastic Partial Differential Equations, University of Southern California, May 22-26, 2007. She also participated in the Seminar on Mathematical Methods in the Basic Sciences with Lee Smolin: "Could quantum mechanics be an approximation to another, cosmological, theory?" (November 14, 2006); and "(Gauge-) Natural Theories" (December 12, 2006). The continued collaboration between Drs. Iftime and Stachel resulted in a paper on the hole argument for covariant theories published in the GRG Journal: General Relativity and Gravitation. They are continuing to work on the role of conformal and projective structures in general relativity, and last fall submitted a proposal to the NSF on this topic, which was approved but not funded. During the Fall semester, Drs. Iftime and Stachel continued their seminar on "Mathematical Methods in Basic Sciences.”