Alfred I. Tauber's Books

The Triumph of Uncertainty

Science and Self in the Postmodern Age

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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The Triumph of Uncertainty

Science and Self in the Postmodern Age

By: Alfred I. Tauber

Tauber, a leading figure in history and philosophy of science, offers a unique autobiographical overview of how science as a discipline of thought has been characterized by philosophers and historians over the past century. He frames his account through science’s – and his own personal – quest for explanatory certainty. During the 20th century, that goal was displaced by the probabilistic epistemologies required to characterize complex systems, whether in physics, biology, economics, or the social sciences. This “triumph of uncertainty” is the inevitable outcome of irreducible chance and indeterminate causality. And beyond these epistemological limits, the interpretative faculties of the individual scientist (what Michael Polanyi called the “personal” and the “tacit”) invariably affects how data are understood. Whereas positivism had claimed radical objectivity, post-positivists have identified how a web of non-epistemic values and social forces profoundly influence the production of knowledge. Tauber presents a case study of these claims by showing how immunology has incorporated extra-curricular social elements in its theoretical development and how these in turn have influenced interpretive problems swirling around biological identity, individuality, and cognition. The correspondence between contemporary immunology and cultural notions of selfhood are strong and striking. Just as uncertainty haunts science, so too does it hover over current constructions of personal identity, self knowledge, and moral agency. Across the chasm of uncertainty, science and selfhood speak.

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Page Count

404

Publisher

Central European University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

9633866863

ISBN 13

9789633866863

Immunity

The Evolution of an Idea

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Immunity

The Evolution of an Idea

By: Alfred I. Tauber

Modern immunology traditionally conceives of the immune system as providing defense against pathogens. Alfred I. Tauber criticizes this conception of immunity as too narrow, because it discounts much of the immune system's other normal functions. These include active tolerance of nutritional exchanges with the environment and the stabilization of cooperative relationships with resident micro-organisms. An expanded account extends immunity's functional role from singular 'defense' to broadened discernment of environmental 'exchange.' This ecological perspective has profound theoretical implications, for the basic notion of immune identity is reconfigured: highlighting the organism as a holobiont (a consortium of diverse organisms living in cooperative relationships) challenges prevailing concepts of individuality and the self/nonself dichotomy heretofore organizing immune theory. Indeed, if theoretical interest is focused on the challenges of maintaining immune balance in the full ecological context of the organism, then immune regulation assumes new complexity. Tauber maintains that the key to unravelling that puzzle requires a critical re-assessment of the cognitive processes that underlie immune effector functions. Accordingly, he provides the outline of a re-formulated 'cognitive paradigm' that dispenses with agent-based models and adopts an ecologically conceived understanding of perception and information processing. The implications of this revised configuration of immunity and its deconstructed notions of individuality and selfhood have wide significance for philosophers and life scientists working in immunology, ecology, and the cognitive sciences.

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329

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190651253

ISBN 13

9780190651251

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

By: Alfred I. Tauber

Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.

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341

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400836921

ISBN 13

9781400836925

Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology

From Metaphor to Theory

By: Alfred I. Tauber,Leon Chernyak

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Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology

From Metaphor to Theory

By: Alfred I. Tauber,Leon Chernyak

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.

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Page Count

276

Publisher

Oxford University Press, USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

019506447X

ISBN 13

9780195064476

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

By: Alfred I. Tauber

Tauber's book is encyclopedic—not only a revealing and comprehensive study of Thoreau but also a full vision of the Romantic Weltanschauung and its relevance to contemporary concerns in philosophy, science, and poetics. While this scope is wildly ambitious, Tauber admirably delivers, always informing his parts with the whole, consistently altering the whole with his parts."—Eric Wilson, author of Emerson's Sublime Science "In arguing for the centrally moral and ethical value of Thoreau's works, Tauber is taking a brave stance in these slippery postmodern times…. It's one thing to praise Thoreau for his opposition to the Mexican War, his philosophy of passive resistance, and his fervent opposition to slavery. It's quite another to argue that his entire project—his whole sense of identity, self-formation, and his relation to nature—is part of a deeply moral enterprise….Thoreau's modernity has been defined in many ways in recent years. Tauber adds another important and distinctive dimension to this discussion."—H. Daniel Peck, John Guy Vassar Professor of English, Vassar College

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Page Count

330

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520239156

ISBN 13

9780520239159

The Generation of Diversity

Clonal Selection Theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology

By: Alfred I. Tauber,Scott H. Podolsky

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The Generation of Diversity

Clonal Selection Theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology

By: Alfred I. Tauber,Scott H. Podolsky

This book is an intellectual history of the major theoretical problem in immunology and its resolution in the post-World War II period. In recent years immunology has been one of the most exciting--and successful--fields of biomedical research; this book provides essential background for understanding the conceptual conflicts occurring in the field.

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532

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674001826

ISBN 13

9780674001824

Requiem for the Ego

Freud and the Origins of Postmodernism

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Requiem for the Ego

Freud and the Origins of Postmodernism

By: Alfred I. Tauber

Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most prominent philosophers of the period—Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Despite their divergent orientations, each contested the ego's capacity to represent mental states through word and symbol to an agent surveying its own cognizance. By discarding the subject-object divide as a model of the mind, they dethroned Freud's depiction of the ego as a conceit of a misleading self-consciousness and a faulty metaphysics. Freud's inquisitors, while employing divergent arguments, found unacknowledged consensus in identifying the core philosophical challenges of defining agency and describing subjectivity. In Requiem, Tauber uniquely synthesizes these philosophical attacks against psychoanalysis and, more generally, provides a kaleidoscopic portrait of the major developments in mid-20th century philosophy that prepared the conceptual grounding for postmodernism.

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329

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0804788308

ISBN 13

9780804788304

Confessions of a Medicine Man

An Essay in Popular Philosophy

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Confessions of a Medicine Man

An Essay in Popular Philosophy

By: Alfred I. Tauber

This book probes the ethical structure of contemporary medicine in an argument accessible to lay readers, healthcare professionals, and ethicists alike.

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Page Count

188

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262700727

ISBN 13

9780262700726

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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341

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400836921

ISBN 13

9781400836925

Immunity

The Evolution of an Idea

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Immunity

The Evolution of an Idea

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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329

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190651253

ISBN 13

9780190651251

The Immune Self

Theory Or Metaphor?

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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The Immune Self

Theory Or Metaphor?

By: Alfred I. Tauber

The Immune Self is the first extended philosophical critique of immunology.

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Page Count

370

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0521574439

ISBN 13

9780521574433

Requiem for the Ego

Freud and the Origins of Postmodernism

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Requiem for the Ego

Freud and the Origins of Postmodernism

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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329

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Stanford University Press

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ISBN 10

0804788308

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9780804788304

The Triumph of Uncertainty

Science and Self in the Postmodern Age

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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The Triumph of Uncertainty

Science and Self in the Postmodern Age

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Page Count

406

Publisher

Central European University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

9633865824

ISBN 13

9789633865828

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

By: Alfred I. Tauber

Tauber's book is encyclopedic--not only a revealing and comprehensive study of Thoreau but also a full vision of the Romantic Weltanschauung and its relevance to contemporary concerns in philosophy, science, and poetics. While this scope is wildly ambitious, Tauber admirably delivers, always informing his parts with the whole, consistently altering the whole with his parts."--Eric Wilson, author of "Emerson's Sublime Science" "In arguing for the centrally moral and ethical value of Thoreau's works, Tauber is taking a brave stance in these slippery postmodern times. . .. It's one thing to praise Thoreau for his opposition to the Mexican War, his philosophy of passive resistance, and his fervent opposition to slavery. It's quite another to argue that his entire project--his whole sense of identity, self-formation, and his relation to nature--is part of a deeply moral enterprise. . ..Thoreau's modernity has been defined in many ways in recent years. Tauber adds another important and distinctive dimension to this discussion."--H. Daniel Peck, John Guy Vassar Professor of English, Vassar College

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Page Count

346

Publisher

Univ of California Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0520225279

ISBN 13

9780520225275

Confessions of a Medicine Man

An Essay in Popular Philosophy

By: Alfred I. Tauber

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Confessions of a Medicine Man

An Essay in Popular Philosophy

By: Alfred I. Tauber

This book probes the ethical structure of contemporary medicine in an argument accessible to lay readers, healthcare professionals, and ethicists alike.

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

188

Publisher

MIT Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0262700727

ISBN 13

9780262700726

The Generation of Diversity

Clonal Selection Theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology

By: Alfred I. Tauber,Scott H. Podolsky

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The Generation of Diversity

Clonal Selection Theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology

By: Alfred I. Tauber,Scott H. Podolsky

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Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

532

Publisher

Harvard University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0674001826

ISBN 13

9780674001824

Book's by Alfred I. Tauber

The Triumph of Uncertainty

The Triumph of Uncertainty

Immunity

Immunity

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology

Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

The Generation of Diversity

The Generation of Diversity

Requiem for the Ego

Requiem for the Ego

Confessions of a Medicine Man

Confessions of a Medicine Man

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher

Immunity

Immunity

The Immune Self

The Immune Self

Requiem for the Ego

Requiem for the Ego

The Triumph of Uncertainty

The Triumph of Uncertainty

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing

Confessions of a Medicine Man

Confessions of a Medicine Man

The Generation of Diversity

The Generation of Diversity

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