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In this deeply thoughtful exploration, Alfred Tauber, a practicing scientist and highly regarded philosopher, eloquently traces the history of the philosophy of science, seeking in the end to place science within the humanistic context from which it originated. Avoiding the dogmatism that has defined both extremes in the recent Science Wars and presenting a conception of reason that lifts the discussion out of the interminable debates about objectivity and neutrality, Tauber offers a way of understanding science as an evolving relationship between facts and the values that govern their discovery and applications. This timely philosophy of science presents a centrist but highly consequential view, wherein truth and objectivity can function as working ideals and serve as pragmatic tools within the sociological context in which they reside. For if the humanization of science is to reach completion, it must reveal not only the meaning it receives from its social and cultural settings but also that which it lends to them.Packed with well-chosen case studies, Science and the Quest for Meaning is a trust-worthy and engaging introduction to the history of, and the current debate surrounding, the philosophy of science.

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An important and stimulating book, but with some shortcomings
I'm actually surprised that no one has left a review for Tauber's Science and the Quest for Meaning yet, this is unquestionably an important work that deserves attention. I assume part of the problem is it being made available by a small university press (and hence the issues with distribution and marketing), and perhaps because it is a dense scholarly work beyond the reach of the more popular scholarly lit genre. It is challenging reading, but then it is a challenging (but very important) topic.

I'm about a third through this work, so consider this a still somewhat tentative review. It is one of those curious books one occasionally encounters, in which one finds the narrative intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking, while at the same time frequently disagreeing with the factuality of specific statements or with the author's formulations. I'm often finding myself reading a particular passage or section and thinking, I would have stated this differently and, in a sense, writing my own narrative in parallel with Tauber's text. This is not necessarily a bad thing, and with Tauber's book I'm finding it a most fruitful exercise.

While belonging more generally to the literature on the so-called "Science Wars", Tauber's book focuses less on the political and social nature of the debate as on the underlying epistemological issues. In so doing, he reaches back to the initial unfolding of the tensions between the natural sciences and the humanities in the Romantic era of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and attempts to highlight the key issues that arose at that time and that course through to the present. For Tauber the key underlying tension is one of competing conceptions of reality, and the claims of positivistic science as the ultimate authority for deciding what is real and what isn't in human existence.

What Tauber has done is to take the key issues of the Science Wars and formulate them not in terms of the now well-known social dynamics, but rather more fundamentally in epistemological terms, as the ongoing quest for certainty in an uncertain world. This of course pits science squarely against the claims of religion, which allows Tauber to develop a highly insightful narrative that goes far in our better understanding the underlying tensions in the Science Wars. One example here is Tauber's powerful analysis of Cardinal Schönburn's now infamous letter he wrote for the NY Times in 2005, attempting to defend Christianity's stance on creationism, and in which Tauber insightfully reveals Schönburn's projecting a theological reality (divine intervention) into the natural world.

At the same time, on numerous occasions I found myself disagreeing to varying degrees with Tauber's formulations and claims. For example, he spends some time characterizing and making use of Heidegger's critique of science and technology, but he does so through a very misleading, indeed incorrect, understanding of what Heidegger was truly getting at. Tauber quotes from Heidegger's essay Wissenschaft und Besinnung, but problematically Tauber makes a simple correspondence between science and the German word Wissenschaft, which loosely translated means "knowledge possession (or acquisition)". The real German word for science--Naturwissenschaft--would have had a very different meaning for Heidegger than the word he actually used--Wissenschaft, and Heidegger's essay would have been a very different one if he had actually written about Naturwissenschaft (in juxtaposition to Kulturwissenschaft). This leads Tauber to an interpretation of Heidegger's essay that is problematic for Tauber's own narrative. Indeed, if Tauber had actually analyzed and made use of Heidegger's true intent in his study of Wissenschaft, he would have structured his argument differently.

Even as I encounter these occasional problems with Tauber's narrative, I am finding it a most productive exercise to work through his text. In this, he has achieved precisely what he intended: to help us in better understanding the Science Wars by engaging us intellectually with the complex and multifaceted nature of the topic, and in provoking us to actively work towards a reconciliation between science and other competing claims to reality. The juxtaposition of the complex issues behind the Science Wars and the underlying epistemology leads to many new insights, and for this alone the book is highly recommended. ... Read more

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In his graceful philosophical account, Alfred I. Tauber shows why Thoreau still seems so relevant today--more relevant in many respects than he seemed to his contemporaries. Although Thoreau has been skillfully and thoroughly examined as a writer, naturalist, mystic, historian, social thinker, Transcendentalist, and lifelong student, we may find in Tauber's portrait of Thoreau the moralist a characterization that binds all these aspects of his career together.

Thoreau was caught at a critical turn in the history of science, between the ebb of Romanticism and the rising tide of positivism. He responded to the challenges posed by the new ideal of objectivity not by rejecting the scientific worldview, but by humanizing it for himself. Tauber portrays Thoreau as a man whose moral vision guided his life's work. Each of Thoreau's projects reflected a self-proclaimed "metaphysical ethics," an articulated program of self-discovery and self-knowing. By writing, by combining precision with poetry in his naturalistpursuits and simplicity with mystical fervor in his daily activity, Thoreau sought to live a life of virtue--one he would characterize as marked by deliberate choice. This unique vision of human agency and responsibility will still seem fresh and contemporary to readers at the start of the twenty-first century. ... Read more

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Thoreau's Response to Post- Modernism
This is a book for two kinds of readers. Those who are particularly drawn to Thoreau will find a provocative thesis on which to hang all of his various pursuits. Tauber approaches him as a historian and philosopher of science, and shows how Thoreau was reacting against a rising tide of positivism - a form of radical objectivity -- to preserve his individualistic perspective on the world. Whether he was doing natural history or cultural history, Thoreau collected facts and assembled them to uniquely construct his own view of nature or culture. But Thoreau is only a foil for Tauber's larger purposes. Tauber's major theme is that all knowledge is value-laden and we choose the values by which to know the world and live in it. The fact/value distinction, so important in much of philosophy of science, is brought together here. This thesis is of interest, not only to understand Thoreau, but for a very much wider set of concerns. Tauber is charting out a post-critical understanding of the nature of knowledge, building on two philosophies: Michael Polanyi's "tacit mode" of understanding and Emanuel Levinas's ethical metaphysics. The first argues that the conditions that make knowing possible are not "foundational" or can ever be made explicit, but rather are embedded in individual experience and common social life; from this source, explicit knowledge is created. The second thesis maintains that values determine how we encounter the world and ultimately know it. These themes are not novel to contemporary philosophy, but when posed in present debates about the nature of reality, the claims of relativism, and the problematic status of the self, Tauber's synthesis offers a way out of the maze of postmodernism to new assertions about the primacy of the person. Thoreau is used to demonstrate how the postmodern challenge has its origins in the romanticism and that the responses offered then, when understood in the light of 20th century developments, takes on new significance. This is an ambitious book: The Thoreau lover will find some of the philosophy challenging and the philosophically inclined will find the focus on Thoreau potentially distracting. But each will find their efforts well paid: the first will understand Thoreau in a new way, and the second will see a philosophy enacted in a rarely realized illustration. ... Read more

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The principle of patient autonomy dominates the contemporary debate over medical ethics. In this examination of the doctor-patient relationship, physician and philosopher Alfred Tauber argues that the idea of patient autonomy—which was inspired by other rights-based movements of the 1960s—was an extrapolation from political and social philosophy that fails to ground medicine's moral philosophy. He proposes instead a reconfiguration of personal autonomy and a renewed commitment to an ethics of care. In this formulation, physician beneficence and responsibility become powerful means for supporting the autonomy and dignity of patients. Beneficence, Tauber argues, should not be confused with the medical paternalism that fueled the patient rights movement. Rather, beneficence and responsibility are moral principles that not only are compatible with patient autonomy but also strengthen it. Coordinating the rights of patients with the responsibilities of their caregivers will result in a more humane and robust medicine.

Tauber examines the historical and philosophical competition between facts (scientific objectivity) and values (patient care) in medicine. He analyzes the shifting conceptions of personhood underlying the doctor-patient relationship, offers a "topology" of autonomy, from Locke and Kant to Hume and Mill, and explores both philosophical and practical strategies for reconfiguring trust and autonomy. Framing the practicalities of the clinical encounter with moral reflections, Tauber calls for an ethical medicine in which facts and values are integrated and humane values are deliberately included in the program of care. ... Read more

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"An intelligent and thorough philosophical analysis of the medical caremorass, this does no less than clear away superficial and superfluousarguments, leaving a few essential issues and a direction for reform."-- Kirkus ReviewsIn Confessions of a Medicine Man, Alfred Tauber probes the ethicalstructure of contemporary medicine in an argument accessible to layreaders, healthcare professionals, and ethicists alike. Through personalanecdote, historical narrative, and philosophical discussion, Taubercomposes a moral portrait of the doctor-patient relationship. In a timewhen discussion has focused on market forces, he seeks to show how ourbasic conceptions of health, the body, and most fundamentally our verynotion of selfhood frame our experience of illness. Tauber presents arelational ethic that must orient medical science and a voraciousindustry back to their primary moral responsibility: the empatheticresponse to the call of the ill. ... Read more

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MEDICAL ETHICS FOR THE TWENTY-FIRSTCENTURY
Here is a short, resonant book on a topic that concerns us all:medical ethics.

Alfred I. Tauber is a biochemist and an M.D. (medical doctor). He is also a professor of medicine and a professor of philosophy at BostonUniversity.

Tauber provides us with hard-to-get knowledge: (1) athoughtful historical overview of the development of twentieth centurymedicine (1880 to the end of the 1990s), with particular focus on thedoctor-patient relationship; and (2) a philosophically sophisticatedanalytical scheme that enables the reader to assess current developments (crudely: How is my HMO or managed care plan doing?).

Although Taubersubtitles his book "An Essay in Popular Philosophy," the word"popular" is somewhat misleading.The reader entirely innocentof twentieth-century Anlgo-American analyic philosophy as well as of itsdifferences from Continental (European) philosophy, may intially have a bitof hard time following the argument.

Nevertheless, CONFESSIONS OF AMEDICINE MAN is the right book at the right time.Deeply philosophical andfactually up-to-the-minute, it provides the compass we need to understandthe real causes of the "crisis in medical care" that most averageAmericans face. For example, Tauber gives an extended--andbrilliant--critique of one of those causes: the total acceptance of theidea of the "autonomous self" within the context of thedoctor-patient relationship.

For the interested reader, Tauber provides a valuable (& wonderfully readable) section called "BibliographicNotes."Here thereader can trace out the origins of Tauber'sthinking on the key topics covered in the book: changes in Americanmedicine over the past 120 years; the various concepts of "self"that doctors and HMOs adopt and how these varous concepts directly affectthe patient'srelationship with herdoctor; the whole notion of"medical ethics" itself and what its various interpretations maymean to the patient and her family (one of Tauber fresh observations:"medical ethics" is fast becoming a specialty, just like surgeryor gastroenterology--and that is just the direction we do NOT want togo).

A serious, needed book, one that challengesAmerican medicine'sdangerous and unacknowledged assumptions about exactly who the doctor isand who the patient is.Bravo! ... Read more

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Since Galileo, critics have waged a relentless assault against science, attacking it as dehumanizing, reductionist, relativistic, dominating, and imperialistic. Supporters meanwhile view science as synonymous with modernity and progress. The current debates over the role of science-- described by such headlines as Scientists are Urged to Fight Back Against `Politically Correct' Critics in The Chronicle of Higher Education--testify to how deeply divided we remain about the values and responsibilities of science in the modern age.

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This collection of essays ranges from phenomenologicaldescriptions of the beautiful in science to analytical explorations ofthe philosophical conjunction of the aesthetic and the scientific. Thebook is organized around two central tenets. The first is thatscientific experience is laden with an emotive content of thebeautiful, which is manifest in the conceptualization of raw data,both in the particulars of presenting and experiencing the phenomenonunder investigation, and in the broader theoretical formulation thatbinds the facts into unitary wholes. The second major themeacknowledges that there may be deeply shared philosophical foundationsunderlying science and aesthetics, but in the twentieth century suchcommonality has become increasingly difficult to discern. The problemaccounts in large measure for the recurrent debate on how to linkScience and Beauty, and the latent tension inherent in the effort totentatively explore what is oftentimes only their intuited synthesis. ... Read more

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A note on McAllister
I am commenting only on McAllister's chapter. (This chapter is not very representative, being bad and analytic whereas most of the other chapters are bad and continental.)

McAllister's thesis is this: "The mechanism by which scientists' aesthetic preferences are constructed and revised, I suggest, is inductive. A community constructs its aesthetic canon ... from among the aesthetic features of all past theories by attributing to each feature a weighting roughly proportional to the degree of empirical success scored up to that date by the theories which have embodied that feature." (p. 180-181).

The thesis may be separated into two claims:

(1) Whenever a scientist expresses _positive_ (i.e., appreciative) aesthetic judgement of a theory, this is due to his identifying properties of the theory that have been correlated with empirical success in past theories.

(2) Whenever a scientist expresses _negative_ aesthetic judgement of a theory, his evaluation will be reversed if the theory proves empirically successful.

McAllister's evidence for his thesis consists in two case studies corresponding to these two claims; namely, Copernicus' heliocentric theory for the first and Kepler's law of ellipses for the second.

So let us consider Copernicus first. McAllister notes that Copernicus adhered to the Platonic emphasis on uniform circular motion and criticised Ptolemy for violating this principle in his use of the equant (i.e., in allowing circular motion to be uniform only with respect to a point other than its centre). Let us allow for the sake of argument that these were aesthetic judgements (though I do not think that McAllister has any good evidence for this). Then, sure enough, these aesthetic judgements were a form of conservatism. But (1) is not supported but rather flatly contradicted. According to McAllister's theory, the empirical success of Ptolemy's theory should have led scientists to induce aesthetic _appreciation_ for the equant, which is precisely the opposite of what happened. McAllister avoids this point by insisting instead that the "aesthetic induction" in question is one based on Artistotle: "Copernicus sought to formulate an astronomical theory that was more Aristotelian than Ptolemy's had been" (p. 179).

Copernicus theory had many virtues, but being "more Aristotelian" was most emphatically not among them. The absurdity of this claim should be obvious enough that it need not be documented here. Suffice it to note that _even if_ Copernicus had been impressed by Aristotelianism, McAllister's account would still be arbitrary and ad hoc. For why would Copernicus induce the beauty of the principle of circularity rather than, say, the theory of the four elements (which would of course have precluded heliocentrism)?

Nevertheless it can be amusing to allow for the sake of argument the ridiculous idea that Copernicus was eager to be "more Aristotelian." Even with this generous concession McAllister is in trouble. For Copernicus managed to remove the equant only at the cost of making the centre of the orbit non-stationary. Thus the centre of the epicycle does not trace out a circle in space, as it does in Ptolemy's theory. Whence one could claim with good reason, as Kepler in fact did, that it is Ptolemy's theory and not Copernicus's that is in better accord with the requirement of perfect circular motion.

Now let us consider McAllister's evidence for (2). He claims that Kepler's law of ellipses is an example of an innovation initially resisted for being aesthetically displeasing. It was resisted, to be sure, but was this for aesthetic reasons? McAllister's only evidence is a quotation from Crüger writing in 1629 that "I am no longer repelled by the elliptical form of the planetary orbits" (p. 184). This after he had become convinced of the value of the Rudolphine Tables based on Kepler's theory. No further evidence is provided that the repulsion in question was aesthetic in nature, even though one can surely be "repelled" by many other things besides, such as, for example, mathematical intractability.

But even if we set aside the problem of the delineation of aesthetics a no less serious problem remains. Let us say that a particular astronomer once found circles particularly aesthetically pleasing, and placed great emphasis on this fact. Suppose that he then realised that circles are empirically inadequate and that it is necessary to use ellipses instead; and that he subsequently stopped talking about the beauty of circles. I say: nothing in this indicates that he has changed his aesthetic preferences. It may be that he still hold the exact same aesthetic views, but that he choses not to keep expressing them since there would be no point in doing so.

To state this last point in more general terms: no one doubts that conservatism, including aesthetic conservatism, has often been overcome by empirical data; the novel part of (2) is that the aesthetic standards themselves change in the process. McAllister presents no evidence for this.

Consider the following analogy. An artist believes that a particular scene would be most beautiful if rendered in full colour, but he has only red chalk available to him. He draws the scene in red chalk and expresses aesthetic satisfaction with the result. If we reason in analogy with McAllister we should conclude that the artist's aesthetic standards have undergone a radical transformation: he has "induced" an aesthetic appreciation of redness in response to "empirical" circumstances. Of course this is altogether nonsense. The fact that the artist initially preferred to draw the scene in other colours does not preclude him from finding aesthetic value in a red drawing. Only the absurdly naive assumption that aesthetic principles are of the form "green is pretty," "red is pretty," etc., would lead one to ascribe a change in aesthetic attitude to the artists in question.

Of curse, as we saw above, McAllister makes precisely such a naive assumption. That is, he assumes that scientists' aesthetic judgements can be reduced to a set of propositions of the form "such-and-such a property confers such-and-such an amount of beauty". _On this assumption_, if a scientist first finds a theory ugly because it has a particular property, and then later find the theory beautiful for any reason whatever, then this is enough to prove that the aesthetic induction has operated (in removing the aesthetic preference based on the property in question). This assumption is pushed to its logical conclusion by Kuipers (Synthese, 131, 2002) who embraces McAllister's theory and writes: "my refined claim about aesthetic induction can be falsified: determine a nonempirical ... feature which happens to accompany all increasingly successful theories in a certain area from a certain stage on and which is not generally considered beautiful, and increasingly so, by the relevant scientists" (pp. 318-319). It is true that properties such as elliptical orbits, action at a distance, etc. were initially resisted and later attached to theories considered beautiful. But neither McAllister nor Kuipers offers any evidence that these properties _as such_ were considered beautiful in the latter case. They simply take this for granted because it follows from their assumption on the propositional nature of aesthetic judgements. ... Read more

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This fascinating intellectual history is the first critical study of the work of Elie Metchnikoff, the founding father of modern immunology. Metchnikoff authored and championed the theory that phagocytic cells actively defend the host body against pathogens and diseased cells.His program developed from comparative embryological studies that sought to establish genealogical relations between species at the dawn of the Darwinian revolution.In this scientific biography, Tauber and Chernyak explore ore Metchnikoff's development as an embryologist, showing how it prepared him to propose his theory of host-pathogen interaction. They discuss the profound impact of Darwin's theory of evolution on Metchnikoff's progress, and the influence of 19th century debates on vitalism, teleology, and mechanism. As a case study of scientific discovery, this work offers lucid insight into the process of creative science and its dependence on cultural and philosophic sources. Immunologists and historians of science and medicine will find it an absorbing and accessible account of a remarkable individual. ... Read more

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In recent decades, immunology has been one of the most exciting -- and successful -- fields of biomedical research.Over the past thirty years, immunologist have acquired a detailed understanding of the immune system's unique recognition mechanism and of the cellular and chemical means used to destroy or neutralize invading organisms.This understanding has been formulated in terms of the clonal selection theory, the dominant explanation of immune behavior.That story is the subject of The Generation of Diversity. ... Read more

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The Immune Self is a critical study of immunology from its origins at the end of the nineteenth century to its contemporary formulation.The book offers the first extended philosophical critique of immunology, in which the function of the term "self", which underlies the structure of current immune theory, is analyzed. However, this analysis is carefully integrated into a broad survey of the major scientific developments in immunology, a discussion of their historical context, and a review of the conceptual arguments that have molded this sophisticated modern science. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of Science and Religion, brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 2796 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.Addresses the interactions, contradictions, and tensions between science and religion, both historically and in contemporary life. The set examines technologies like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and continuing developments in neurophysiology against the backdrop of deeply-held religious beliefs. In addition, phenomena such as the Church of Scientology are also studied, along with more traditional issues, such as the origins of life, the nature of sin, and the philosophy of science and religion. ... Read more

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Focusing on the complex process of the acute immunologic response, this timely book details current research involving humoral and cellular components, serving as a convenient and concise summary of advances in the study of the pathophysiology of allergy. A tribute to K. Frank Austen, whose pioneering research is acknowledged worldwide, the volume contains contributions from investigators in the United States, Africa, Australia, Europe, Israel, and Japan. It covers the considerable progress made in the study of allergic reactions, with attention to such topics as arachidonic acid metabolism; mast cells and eosinophils; phagocytes and proteases; phylogeny of the plasma regulatory proteins of the complement system; mastocytosis; modulation of allergic response by fish oil lipids; and much more. ... Read more

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This book consists, in Part One, of 14 philosophical essaysabout Nature and Human Nature: classical Greek and modern West,natural and supernatural, myth and imagination, Taoist, Buddhist andChristian, scientific and ethical. In Part Two are ten papers byErazim Kohak, for whom the book is a celebration. These areselected to present Kohak's seminal approach to understandingmen and women living in societies within their natural environment.The focus of the book is on philosophical ecology: Whose Nature? whichMorality? and on Kohak's feeling for a `moral sense of Nature'.The authors are Klaus Brinkmann, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, LiviaKohn, Alfred Tauber, Lawrence Cahoone, Tienyu Cao, Robert Neville,Abner Shimony, Alan Olson, Alfred Ferrarin, Krzysztof Michalski andStephen Scully. There is a full bibliography of Erazim Kohak,now Professor of Philosophy at the Charles University, Prague, andemeritus at Boston University. Audience: This book will widely appeal to social ethics groups(sociology, religious organizations, etc), existentialists andphenomenological programs, historians of ideas in general and ofethics in particular, science and society centers, and women'sstudies. ... Read more

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Includes special section on Philosophy of Medicine. ... Read more