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 naturalist pursuits 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.
"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"
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From the Inside Flap
"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
Alfred I. Tauber is Professor of Philosophy at the Boston University Department of Philosophy, Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine, and Director emeritus of The Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science. He also holds a visiting professorship at Tel Aviv University, where he teaches philosophy of science at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas.
Dr. Tauber is a hematologist and biochemist by training. From his interest in basic immunology, he began a critical examination of modern biology and medicine. These studies have focused on scientific epistemology: positivism, reductionism, and the relationship of facts and values. Aside from over 125 research publications in biochemistry and immunology, Dr. Tauber has published more than 90 papers on 19th and 20th century biomedicine, contemporary science studies, and ethics. In 2008, he was awarded the Science Medal from the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna for his critical studies of immunology.
A Summary of Research Interests:
My key works, which have spawned the rest of my scholarship for the past twenty years, consist of three intellectual biographies (Metchnikoff, Thoreau, and Freud) and an autobiography. These studies, while philosophically informed, align closely with other genres - the history of ideas and moral philosophy. The problems that intrigue me - personal identity, the value structure of science, the effort to find coherence in a world fragmented by competing notions of truth - have carried me into topics that each demand an interpretation guided by a self-conscious appraisal of our ethics, broadly construed. The inter-disciplinary nature of this work makes unusual demands on the reader. A bioethicist might not appreciate how discussions of patient autonomy relate to Thoreau's personal journey, or how a study of psychoanalysis complements a philosophical analysis of immunological theory, but for me, everything is of one piece. Below, I offer an outline of my work.
Typically, one's life experience shapes one's scholarship. In my case, to bridge two careers, namely, biomedical research and philosophy, became my central challenge. That transition occurred after I had established myself as a scientist, and thus my journey into the humanities was framed by an over-arching question: How might such a bridge be constructed and what drove me to build it?
In answer to that inquiry, I regard Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (2001) as my central work. There I explored the problem of translating scientific knowledge into personal meaning. Thoreau's reaction to the 19th century's professionalization of science and the ascendancy of new forms of objectivity offered me a case example of how science might be contextualized into its larger humanistic meanings and thereby present a picture of reality within human subjectivity. The effort does not pit scientific ways of knowing against other epistemologies, but recognizes how moral, aesthetic, and spiritual dimensions of experience might cohere within the reality offered by science. That effort built upon Thoreau's credo of imaginative individuality, one that I embraced as a powerful antidote to the nihilism born in his era and to the postmodern suspicions of individual autonomy so current in our own.
The basic message of Thoreau was extended in Science and the Quest for Meaning (2009). There I presented contemporary science from the perspective of current science studies, which generally maintains that science is unified neither in its methods, its standards, nor its interpretative strategies; that its various epistemologies fail any final form of objectivity; that theories and models evolve from loose creative strategies; and that the pragmatic assembly of facts relies on varying degrees of certainty and interpretative facility. These positions had been amply illustrated in my earlier critique of immunology's governing theory (The Immune Self, Theory or Metaphor? [1994]), but with Quest I had a larger agenda. Quest offered a humanistic account of how science must ultimately be integrated into notions both of social reality and of the existential placement of humans in their natural cosmos. The metaphysics of science and the metaphysics of personal experience can hardly be the same, but the effort to find coherence represents a critically important unfulfilled project.
This position had been inspired, in large measure, by the challenge of practicing humane medicine. As a research clinician, I faced the daunting task of integrating my scientific persona, and the demands of employing a scientific medicine, with the imperative of offering empathetic care. In Confessions of a Medicine Man (1999), I explored the emotional and moral tensions that resulted. This short book, my most popular, is a testament of my own professional awakening of the physician's moral identity. Readers appreciated the personal vignettes that I sprinkled in between my discursive descriptions of modern health care and my pleas for making medicine's science and technologies subordinate to the moral mandate of caring for the patient.
While Confessions combined autobiography and analysis, Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (2005) offered a detailed examination of the doctor-patient relationship coupled with a critique of current notions of patient autonomy. I argued that differing notions of autonomy depend on how personal identity is construed. In my view, politico-judicial models of citizen autonomy only confound the lived experience of illness and the realities of the clinic. I maintain that physician responsibility must be based on an interpersonal, relational construct of identity, not the severe autonomy of patient-as-independent-agent-and-consumer now so well adapted to the commodification of health care. To circle back: my Thoreau grounds this ethical position by highlighting a heightened moral sensitivity to everyday experience coupled with the sensitivity requisite to understanding not only others, but also ourselves.
Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher (2010) draws all of these issues together. Dispensing with arguments about the scientific standing of psychoanalysis, I seek to understand the abiding truth that Freudianism offers: We are strangers to ourselves, because we live largely unconsciously; and as we recall our past and recognize a reconfigured personal history, we gain the opportunity to assume responsibility for who we are and what we might become. That psychoanalysis has been called a "religion" seems perfectly apt to me: it holds that insight leads to redemption, a promise that despite the determinism governing our inner psychic life, a freedom beckons. The paradox - we are determined yet free - echoes Thoreau's own anthem.
I call my guiding philosophy a "moral epistemology," which tries to capture the inextricable weaving of personal values into our use of knowledge and into our ways of knowing. Why is that important? Simply, an improved understanding of this process offers us the potential freedom of better exercising moral responsibility.
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.
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