Book Description
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. ... Read more

Book Description
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

Book Description
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

Book Description
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 science but eager to preserve its strengths and values, Alfred I. Tauber's anthology seeks to avoid an either/or configuration. Science, Tauber argues, is fundamentally pluralistic and must accept detracting criticism as part of its very code in the hope that, in its defense, the scientific enterprise is strengthened and reaffirmed.

Featuring essays by a wide range of interdisciplinary, classical, and contemporary thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Thomas Kuhn, Hilary Putnam, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Max Weber, the work is divided into five parts: science and its worldview; the problem of scientific realism; the nature of scientific change; the boundaries of science; and science and values.

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Book Description

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 cells of the immune system could produce millions of distinct antibodies--and produce them on demand. The clonal selection theory explains that cells with genetic instructions to produce each antibody exist in the body in small numbers until exposure to the right molecule--the antigen--triggers the selective cloning that will reproduce exactly the cell needed. But how can so many different antibody-producing cells be generated from such limited genetic material? The solution to this question came from new applications of molecular biology, and, as the authors argue, the impact of the new techniques changed both the methods and the concepts of immunology.

The Generation of Diversity is an intellectual history of the major theoretical problem in immunology and its resolution in the post-World War II period. It will provide for immunologists essential background for understanding the conceptual conflicts occurring in the field today.

Book Description
Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2000. and First Prize, 2000, American Medical Writers Association (AMWA) Medical Book Award in the category of Books for Allied Health Professionals.

In Confessions of a Medicine Man, Alfred Tauber probes the ethical structure of contemporary medicine in an argument accessible to lay readers, healthcare professionals, and ethicists alike. Through personal anecdote, historical narrative, and philosophical discussion, Tauber composes a moral portrait of the doctor-patient relationship. In a time when discussion has focused on market forces, he seeks to show how our basic conceptions of health, the body, and most fundamentally our very notion of selfhood frame our experience of illness. Tauber presents a relational ethic that must orient medical science and a voracious industry back to their primary moral responsibility: the empathetic response to the call of the ill. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

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

Book Description
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

Customer Reviews (1)

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

Book Description
Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature.Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, LiviaKohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski,Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin.Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohák, with10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on thequestion of the moral sense of nature. ... Read more

Book Description
This digital document is an article from Christianity and Literature, published by Conference on Christianity and Literature on September 22, 2003. The length of the article is 1325 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. 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.

Citation Details
Title: Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing.(Book Review)
Author: J.R. Holt
Publication: Christianity and Literature (Refereed)
Date: September 22, 2003
Publisher: Conference on Christianity and Literature
Volume: 53Issue: 1Page: 114(3)

Article Type: Book Review

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