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...
This fascinating intellectual history is the first critical study of the work of Elie Metchnikoff, the founding father of modern immunology. Metchniko...
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....
In his graceful philosophical account, Alfred I. Tauber shows why Thoreau still seems so relevant today--more relevant in many respects than he seemed...
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" that 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.
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 offe...
In recent decades immunology has been one of the most exciting--and successful--fields of biomedical research. Over the past thirty years immunologists 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.
A major problem for immunologists had long been to determine how...
In recent decades immunology has been one of the most exciting--and successful--fields of biomedical research. Over the past thirty years immunolog...
"De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est la. " Charles Baudelaire (journal entry) This anthology is my visit to Oz. On sabbatical in 1988, I chose to reeducate myself in general biology, first broadening my erudition as an immunologist, and then extending that horizon into evolutionary biology and embryology. I was particularly attracted to reflections on the nature of the self as an organ- ismic concept. I went in search of reorientation as a confused physician- scientist, and came back with this book. Baum's Wizard of Oz presented opportunities for growth, and herein...
"De la vaporisation et de la centralisation du Moi. Tout est la. " Charles Baudelaire (journal entry) This anthology is my visit to Oz. On sabbatical ...
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.
Acknowledging the validity of a deep skepticism about...
Since Galileo, critics have waged a relentless assault against science, attacking it as dehumanizing, reductionist, relativistic, dominating, and i...
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.
Acknowledging the validity of a deep skepticism about...
Since Galileo, critics have waged a relentless assault against science, attacking it as dehumanizing, reductionist, relativistic, dominating, and i...
Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohak, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.
Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert...
The tension between art and science may be traced back to the Greeks. What became "natural philosophy" and later "science" has traditionally been posed as a fundamental alternative to poetry and art. It is a theme that has commanded central attention in Western thought, as it captures the ancient conflict of Apollo and Dionysus over what deserves to order our thought and serve as the aspiration of our cultural efforts. The modern schi sm between art and science was again clearly articulated in the Romantic period and seemingly grew to a crescendo fifty years aga as a result of the debate...
The tension between art and science may be traced back to the Greeks. What became "natural philosophy" and later "science" has traditionally been pose...
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...
Requiem for the Ego recounts Freud's last great attempt to 'save' the autonomy of the ego, which drew philosophical criticism from the most ...
