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2007–2008 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. In addition, the Center hosted visiting scholars Einav Katan and Roy Wagner from Tel Aviv University.
The Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science hosted its 48th 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 colloquia focused on the work of Turing, Thoreau, Gödel, and Martin Eger; a forum of lectures delivered by leading Italian philosophers; a series of papers on the future directions in a) philosophy of medicine and b) mind/brain research; and a variety of symposia dedicated to topics in philosophy of science: Aristotle’s biology, natural kinds, mathematical representations of space, character of physical laws, kinematics and dynamics in special relativity, and “fictions” in science.
Exchange Program with The Cohn Institute for History of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. The Center continued an exchange program between faculty and graduate students from Tel Aviv University and Boston University. Prof. Eli Dresner taught “Measurement, Mind, and Meaning;” a graduate student, Einav Katan, pursued her research to complete her doctoral degree and Roy Wagner, conducted post-doctoral research in philosophy of mathematics.
Postdoctoral Fellowship. The Center sponsored one postdoctoral fellow this year: Alfred Miller, who taught courses in medical ethics and philosophy of biology in the Department of Philosophy and completed various articles for publication.
Dissertation Fellowship. The Center sponsored one doctoral candidate from the Department of Philosophy this year: Gal Kober, who is completing a dissertation project that critiques the notion of species in biology.
Center Members
Directors
Alfred I. Tauber
Director
Prof. Tauber’s study of science in contemporary American culture, Science and its Quest for Meaning, will be published by Baylor University Press (2009), which sponsored the Visiting Professorship (2006) that initiated this monograph. The book, written for non-specialists, examines post-positivist descriptions of science, the historical evolution of the science-humanities relationship, and the religious-political debates dominating current discussions of science’s place in American society. A second book project nearing completion examines the philosophical foundations of psychoanalytic theory through a study of Freud’s philosophical influences. Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher: Psychoanalysis as Philosophy, shows how Franz Brentano’s challenge of establishing psychic causation framed Freud’s own attempts at developing a new science of mind, and how that effort evolved from a positivist-inspired empirical project into a complex ethical examination of human nature and potential. This multi-focal analysis attempts to situate Freud among the philosophers who directly influenced him (Brentano, Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche) and thereby portray psychoanalysis as a philosophical activity. Dr. Tauber also continued scientific collaborations at Tel Aviv University on the regulation and organization of complex bacterial systems and in another professorial visiting appointment, he consulted on medical curriculum reform at the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Center.
Recent publications include 1) Tauber, A.I. “Expanding immunology: Defensive versus ecological perspectives,” abook review essay of Defending Life. The Nature of Host-parasite Relations by Elling Ulvestad, Dordrecht: Springer, 2007. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 51:270-84, 2008; 2) Cooper, R.A. and Tauber, A.I. “Values and Ethics: A Collection of Curricular Reforms for a New Generation of Physicians.” Academic Medicine. 82:321–323, 2007; 3) Tauber, A. I. “Balancing medicine’s moral ledger: Realigning trust and responsibility,” in Responsibility, Darling-Smith (ed.) Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 129-48, 2007; 4) Segal, S. P. and Tauber, A. I. “Revisiting Hume’s Law.” American Journal of Bioethics, 7:43-5, 2007; 5) Tauber, A. I. “Science and reason, reason and faith: A Kantian perspective,” in Intelligent Design. Science or Religion? Critical Perspectives, R. M. Baird and S. E. Rosenbaum (eds.), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007, pp. 307-36. Republished in Alhikma 1:73-108, 2008.
During the past year, Dr. Tauber delivered the following lectures: 1) “Constructing a Philosophy of Medicine,” at Future Horizons for Philosophy of Medicine, Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, September 24, 2007; 2) “Expanding Medical Ethics: Moving from the Extraordinary to the Ordinary, The First Ezekiel J. Emanuel Lecture in Medical Ethics & Health Policy, Faculty of Medicine, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, March 18, 2008; 3) “Metchnikoff’s Paradigm of Immunity, Then and Now,” at Metchnikoff’s Legacy in 2008, Pasteur Institute, Paris, April 28, 2008; 4) “Metchnikoff's Paradigm of Immunity, Then and Now,” at the Interdepartmental Center, University of Bologna, May 5, 2008; 5) “The Immune System and its Ecology,” at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University of Bologna, May 7, 2008, where he received the 2008 Science Medal from the Institute.
Robert Cohen
Director Emeritus
The Robert S. Cohen Collection of matters related to the Center’s activities, from its founding in 1960 until Prof. Cohen’s retirement in1993, are now available at the Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University. The collection includes Prof. Cohen’s personal papers, correspondence, files of lectures, manuscripts, program materials of the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, and materials related to the editing of the Boston Studiesin the Philosophy of Science. (A selection from the archive has been deposited at the Institut Wiener Kries in the University of Vienna.) Prof. Cohen was assisted by Enzo de Pellegrin, who completed the project in August 2007. A full catalogue (hard copy and electronic disk) has already been used for historical research.
Prof. Cohen also gifted the bulk of his personal library to Tsinghua University in Beijing. During Spring 2008, two specialist Chinese cataloguers worked with him to prepare detailed catalogue entries for the books and periodicals; some 20,000 books and many series of periodicals were entered, many which also included Chinese translations. The “Robert S. Cohen Collection” will be housed in a newly established portion of the Tsinghua University Library; actual transport is expected in September/October 2008.
Prof. Cohen was also invited to speak at the International Congress for Philosophy of Science, Beijing on August 9-16, 2007. Two events concerned his work: first a symposium on his contributions to philosophy of science in China was held with Chinese and American contributors, who devoted discussions to his five lecture visits to China (1985, 1988, 1992, 1994, 2007), his collaborative organizing of two international congresses in China, his serving as doctoral director for Chinese graduate students at Boston University, and his participation as a collaborator with Chinese post-doctoral fellows. Second, a symposium on the work of Tscha Hung, the main scholar of logical empiricist philosophy of science in China, with contributions from Austrian and Chinese speakers as well as himself. Hung was a Ph.D. at the University of Vienna in the early ‘30s; Cohen knew him in China and by correspondence in the 1980s.
Prof. Cohen also participated in two other conferences: 1) “Rethinking Popper” held in Prague, September 10-14, 2007. He was co-organizer and final plenary speaker. Now he is co-editing a volume of papers for publication in Boston Studies with Zuzana Parusnikova of the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Science. 2) Invited speaker at the international symposium, “Marxist Historiography of the Sciences,” Paris, March 27-28, 2008: His lecture was a critical study of the work of Hessen, Needham, and Zilsel. The meeting was organized by a research group in history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris-Diderot with CNRS.
Cohen also continued his participation in Harvard/Cambridge Hospital weekly seminar on psychiatry where he contributed several sessions on issues of aging.
Peter Bokulich
Associate Director
In the 2007-2008 academic year, Professor P. Bokulich submitted to the journal Erkenntnis an article entitled "The Constraints of Physicalism," which articulates and defends a physicalist ontology. He also submitted the refereed encyclopedia entry (coauthored with Erik Curiel) on "Singularities and Black Holes," which was contracted by the on-line Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Professor Bokulich is currently authoring a book on the relationship between physics and higher-level special sciences. This monograph, tentatively titled The Actual, the Possible, and the Physical, explains the sense in which physics establishes the fundamental modal structure of our world, and how this fact a) constrains the special sciences, b) undercuts arguments for dualist philosophies of mind, and c) provides an account of the relationship between different forms of necessity. Together with Professor Alisa Bokulich, he is also editing a volume of the Boston Studies in Philosophy of Science series on the topic of Scientific Structuralism. Professor Bokulich presented a talk titled "The Constraints of Physicalism" at the Sydney-Tilburg conference on Reduction and the Special Sciences at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, and "The Modality of Structures and the Structure of Modality" at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science; he also moderated two Colloquium sessions, in addition to supervising and hosting other Colloquium sessions in his role as Associate Director. He has been active on the Provost's Panel for Charles Darwin 2009, which is coordinating a year-long New England celebration of Darwin's thought and impact. As part of this effort, all the Colloquium sessions of the 2009 calendar year, which Professor Bokulich has been assembling, will be devoted to Darwinian themes.
Associated Faculty
Alisa Bokulich
Alisa Bokulich’s published Reexamining the Quantum-Classical Relation: Beyond Reductionism and Pluralism with Cambridge University Press; a description of the book and ordering information can be found here. In addition she published two articles: 1) “Paul Dirac and the Einstein-Bohr Debate,” Perspectives on Science 16(1): 103-114, 2008, which argues on the basis of an unpublished lecture found in the Dirac Archives that Dirac sided with Einstein in the famous debate, not Bohr as typically believed. 2) “Explanatory Fictions,” Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization, M. Suárez (ed.), Routledge, forthcoming 2008, which argues that fictional models can be explanatory despite involving false representations of the world. She gave four talks this year, two of which were for the Boston Colloquium. She delivered an invited lecture on “Is Pluto a Planet? Folk Concepts and Natural Kinds in Astronomy” at Ohio University and for the Boston Colloquium. She attended the Models and Simulations 2 conference in the Netherlands where she delivered a paper “Model Explanations, Or How Fictions Can Explain,” and also gave that lecture at the Boston Colloquium on April 25.
John Stachel
This year Dr. Stachel started to work on turning his lecture notes on general relativity into a book on the subject. He has been joined in this work by Kaca Bradonjić, a graduate student in the Physics Department. She has also joined him in working on the topic of conformal and projective structures in general relativity. This fall and spring, he supervised her Directed Research Physics courses on this topic, with the hope that ultimately it will provide the topic of her Doctoral Thesis.
Stachel gave a Physics Colloquium at the Physics Department of The City College of New York on April 30, 2008 on "The Search for a Quantum Theory of Gravity." He and Dr. Mihaela Iftime joined with Dr. Michael Wright of the Archive for Contemporary Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy in organizing a conference on "Trends in the Mathematical Representation of Space: Philosophical and Historical Perspectives," co-sponsored by the Center for Einstein Studies and the Center for Philosophy and History of Science. It started on November 30 with a Colloquium by Prof. Pierre Cartier of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Paris, " On the Naturalness of Mathematics: Towards a Relativised Ontology for Mathematics,"and continued with all-day sessions on Dec. 1-2, 2007 at the Photonics Center. Stachel chaired the Colloquium session on March 17, 2008, at which Prof. Michel Janssen of the University of Minnesota spoke on " Drawing the Line between Kinematics and Dynamics in Special Relativity."
This year he wrote the article on "Albert Einstein" for the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Gale 2008, vol. 2, pp. 363-373, and reviewed Palle Yourgrau's book A World Without Time: The Forgotten Legacy of Gödel and Einstein in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, August 2007, pp. 861-868. His 2005 Mastermind Lecture on "Albert Einstein" was published in the Proceedings of the British Academy 151 (2007), pp. 423-458.
Visiting Professors
Eli Dresner
Visiting Professor, Tel Aviv University
As an affiliate of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University during the academic year 2007-08, Dr. Dresner completed several research papers. Most of the papers concern the theory of measurement and its applications to the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and logic. Throughout the year he has been engaged in dialogue with several researchers in Boston University and other institutions, and presented papers at Boston University (Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science), Rutgers University and Indiana University, Bloomington. As a visiting professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston University he taught a seminar titled “Measurement, Mind, and Meaning.”
Visiting Scholars
Einav Katan
Visiting Scholar, Tel Aviv University
Einav Katan visited the Center during the first year of her PhD program in Tel-Aviv University. She spent the year working on her dissertation proposal: "GAGA – A Free Play of Understanding and Imagination," under the supervision of Professor Moshe Zuckermann from The Cohn Institute of Philosophy and History of Sciences and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. The project deals with the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin's novel language of movement and the work of art it creates. In April 2008, Einav presented her essay "Benjamin's Words of Silence" at the Boston University Graduate Student Presentation Series. The essay explicates Benjamin's hermeneutical approach with respect to art.
Roy Wagner
Visiting Scholar, Tel Aviv University
During Roy Wagner’s stay at BU, he worked on two conference papers, one about the semiotic instability of mathematical variables, and an attempt to read them as “indigenous concepts,” and the other on visibility/mobility regimes applied to marginalized populations in Israel/Palestine. Both papers have been submitted for publication. He also researched primary sources of renaissance algebra for his project on the semiotic role of variables and number representations in 16th century Italy.
Postdoctoral Fellows
Alfred Miller
Prof. Miller, on leave from Catholic University of America, taught an undergraduate lecture course, Medical Ethics (PH 251) and a graduate/undergraduate seminar, Philosophy of Biology (PH 472/672), which focused upon the philosophical implications of recent advances in embryology in comparison with Aristotle’s original paradigm of biology. Prof. Miller also presented two papers: “The Aporetic Approach of Metaphysics Zeta,” presented to the BU graduate student/faculty seminar series on Dec. 10, 2007, and “The Changing Paradigm of Today’s Biology and its Aristotlelian Foundation,” presented at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science on Mar. 29, 2008. Prof. Miller supervised Neel Chudgar (4th year premed student) in a Work for Distinction thesis on “The Ethics of Placebo Surgery in Randomized Clinical Trials.” This supervision extended over Fall and Spring Semesters and the thesis was successfully defended (with honors) on April 25, 2008. He also was an active participant in two reading groups, one based on twentieth-century hermeneutics and a second on Dewey’s philosophy led by Prof. Kestenbaum.
Dissertation Fellows
Gal Kober
During the academic year 2007-2008 Gal Kober continued work on her dissertation. In July 2007 she delivered a talk in the Classification and Essentialism session, at the biannual meeting of the International Society for History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB) in Exeter, UK. In October, she spoke at the Metaphysics of Science conference, Nature and its Classification, in Birmingham, UK.
Research Fellows and Associates
Amir Aczel
Amir D. Aczel published The Jesuit and the Skull (Riverhead Books, 2007). The book details the discovery of Peking Man in 1929 in China, surveys anthropological discoveries, and tells the story of Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit priest who was a key member of the team that discovered Peking Man. Aczel gave 22 radio interviews nationwide about the book, including on NPR's "Talk of the Nation Science Friday" on December 7, 2007. Aczel's statistics textbook, "Complete Business Statistics," was published in its seventh edition in early 2008. Amir Aczel was interviewed in March 2008 in New York for a History Channel documentary about Einstein, titled "Einstein and the Two Eclipses." The film will be released in fall 2008. Aczel is now finishing his book "The Cave," a scientific study of prehistoric European cave art.
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: MWH Americas Inc., International Desalination Research Database - on the Peer Review Committee; June 2007 - on committee for Research and Development in the Abruzzo Region, Italy; June 6–8, 2007 Geneva, Switzerland Sharing Knowledge Foundation. From Red Sea to Dead Sea – Water and Energy – on Scientific Council, planned and chaired the program; July 23–26, 2007 L’Aquila, Italy – Coordinator and Editor of workbook of a course on Thermal Desalination Processes and Economics, Lecturer: Dr. Corrado Sommariva; September 2–6, 2007, PERMEA 07, Siofok, Hungary – invited and published the proceedings in Desalination; October 31– November 1, 2007 Europe–Korea Workshop – program and co-chair. November 5–8, 2007, Harrogate, UK – IWA Specialist Group Series Conference on Membranes in Municipal and Industrial water supply and Wastewater Treatment, Committee member and published proceedings in Desalination. November 5–9, 2007, Sydney, Australia IMSTEC 07 – Sixth International Membrane Science and Technology Conference – editing and publishing the proceedings in Desalination. November 17–19, 2007, Kuwait – Fourth International Conference on Energy Research and Development – on the advisory committee. November 25–28, 2007, Maastricht, The Netherlands, World Congress on Renewable Energy – on the scientific committee. March 21–23, 2008, Algiers, Algeria, WATMED4, The 4th international Conference on Water Resources in the Mediterranean Basin – on the scientific committee; May 25-28, 2008, Algrave, Portugal, Engineering with Membranes 2008 (EWM2008) – on the scientific committee.
Lin Chun
Dr. Lin Chun has continued to teach at the London School of Economics and Political Science, but in the 2007/8 academic year she took a term's leave to visit New York University. She gave various talks on democracy, economic transition, human rights, agrarian development and related philosophical questions in Leeds University, Bologna University, Calcutta's Netaji Bose Research Center, Michigan University and MIT. Her publications in the year include two journal articles, one is a polemic against the idea of privatization and the other a critical reflection on the Chinese path to global integration. Her book project on the methodological problems of political science as a discipline is scheduled for completion next year.
Gennady Gorelik
Dr. Gorelik has just published his book “Pcheline, ili Radionauka i zhizn [Beeline from Radio-science to Everyday Life]” with the subject 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 (VympelCom) created by a team of former anti-ballistic missle radio-engineers. He completed his major project "The Soviet Life of Lev Landau" that resulted in two books (in press). He has been working on a revised 3rd edition of his biography of Andrei Sakharov. An article on Andrei Sakharov was published in the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography, and his article “The Paternity of the H-Bombs: Soviet-American Perspectives,” based on his talks at the Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, has been accepted for publication. Dr. Gorelik's homepage at BU site http://people.bu.edu/gorelik/ presents his publications and other activities.
Helena Gourko
In 2007/2008 academic year Helena Gourko and Alexander Gritsanov published a book: Philosophers of the 20th Century: Jacques Derrida. Minsk: Knizhnyi Dom, 245 pp. (in Russian). Her previously published book, Divine Onomatology: Naming God in Imyaslavie, Symbolism, and Deconstruction was reviewed in La Nuova Europa, N 5, Settembre 2007, and Voprosy Filosofii (N 5, 2007).
Lillian Greeley
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 adapted a nonlinear dynamics technique as a methodological tool to graphically probe social science systems. New developments in computer software technology now enable publication of this work, "Probability Attractors, A Visual Analysis Methodology Adapted for Qualitative Systems Research." Dr. Greeley is also working on an article with Walter J. Freeman, "The Neurodynamics of Intentional Learning, A Primer," which will enable his work in contemporary dynamical systems neuroscience to be accessible to the fields of philosophy, psychology and education. These works, together with her doctoral research at Harvard and a recent educational ethnographic study, are expected to be the foundation of a book, Intentional Learning, Up Close, Personal and Societal.
Mihaela Iftime
During this academic year Dr. Iftime continued her independent research in mathematics and a collaboration with Dr. Stachel, which resulted in a number of articles including " Spacetime geometric structures and the search for a quantum theory of gravity" published in the Differential Geometry & Dynamical System, vol. 10 no. 1: 99-101 (2008), and "Gauge and Gravitation" preprinted on the General Relativity and Quantum Gravity archive (and cited in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). During the fall semester, she and Dr. Stachel organized the Trends on the Mathematical Representation of Space conference at the Boston University Center for Einstein Studies in December 1-2, 2007. They are continuing their joined work on classical and quantum gravity problems.
Dr. Iftime gave several talks including " Spacetime geometric structures and the search for a quantum gravity," at the International DGDS Conference, University Politehnica of Bucharest, October 5-7, 2007; “Grothendieck’s Universe,” at the International Meeting on Trends in the Mathematical Representation of Space, Boston University, Center for Einstein Studies, Boston, December 1-2, 2007; “Gauge and the Hole Argument,” King's College University of London, Dec 17, 2007; “A framework for classical and quantum geometries,” Courant Institute of New York University, New York, March 16, 2008; and “Quantum Issues in Space-Time,” Spinoza Institute, Universiteit Utrecht, Holland, May 29, 2008. She also attended a number of conferences: Inverse Problems in Stochastic Differential Equations , USC, Los Angeles, May 22-26, 2007 ; Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Workshop: Mathematics of Molecular and Cellular Biology , University of Minnesota, October 29 - November 2, 2007 ; Integrability and the Gauge/String Correspondence, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, UK, December 10-14, 2007 UK; National AMS Meeting, San Diego, USA, January 8-9, 2008, Classical and Quantum Gravity Scientific Meeting, Thursday 22 May, 2008, Department of Mathematics, King's College University of London, UK.
Stefania Jha
This year Stefania Jha continued her revision for publication of the study of Eugene Wigner's "Polanyian" epistemology. This epistemology took shape in a dialogue/correspondence between Wigner and Polanyi. The study will show that Wigner's epistemology was not Polanyian, rather he meant a sensibility that his findings in the measurement problem cannot be fully explained explicitly (they are understood tacitly). This study gave rise to another essay, for a talk, on Polanyi's notion of emergence.
Lee McIntyre
Dr. McIntyre published an encyclopedia entry entitled “Logic” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd edition) this year. His book Dark Ages: The Case for a Science of Human Behavior, MIT Press, 2006, was reviewed this year in several publications, including Metapsychology, The Skeptical Inquirer, The European Legacy, The Journal of Economic Literature, and Philosophy in Review. He is currently at work on a new book, which explores the theme of how to make philosophical work matter more to public policy and other governmental decisions involving science. He continues to teach at Simmons College.
Zuraya Monroy-Nasr
During her fellowship Dr. Monroy-Nasr developed a research project on philosophy and history of psychology, specifically on Hermann von Helmholtz and his role in the advent of experimental psychology. This work has three specific components: 1) a historical and philosophical research on the epistemological significance of the transformation of the psychological object of study from a subjective mind into an objective matter; 2) a case study of Helmholtz as a physicist and a physiologist whose epistemological conceptions, instruments and measurements of sense perception (audio or visual), allowed the transformation psychology, and 3) a proposal to broaden the comprehension of historical psychology and contribute to its teaching as a science through the examination of research instruments. The final draft of this work will be ready in July, before the termination of her fellowship. Dr. Monroy-Nasr gave a lecture at the University of Massachusetts, " History and Philosophy of Science and Science Education: a Research Project" in October 2007, and at MIT, "Descartes on light" in April 2008. She will deliver a lecture on "Descartes on forces in a soulless physics" at the Margaret Dauler Wilson Conference in Cornell University on June 30th. Dr. Monroy-Nasr is currently editing a book on Epistemology, Psychologyand Science Teaching (Epistemología, psicología y enseñanza de la ciencia) to be published by the UNAM. In May, Dr. Monroy was awarded with the Medal "Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz" in recognition of her academic achievements at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
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