Alfred I. Tauber

Alfred I. Tauber, Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine and Professor of Philosophy at Boston University, is a philosopher and historian of science, who, since 1993, has served as Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University. Since 2004, he has held a part-time visiting professorship at Tel Aviv University, where he teaches in the Cohn Institute for the History of Science and Ideas and supervises research in the medical school. While primarily teaching and writing in science studies and bioethics, he originally trained as a biochemist and hematologist. Aside from over 125 research publications in biochemistry and cell biology, Tauber has published extensively on 19th and 20th century biomedicine, the development of modern immunology, the doctor-patient relationship, and contemporary science studies.

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Books

An authority on the philosophy of immunology, Alfred Tauber published the first philosophical study of contemporary immunology, The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? (Cambridge 1994), which became the middle monograph of a trilogy on the theoretical development of modern immunology. This work was followed by Confessions of a Medicine Man (MIT Press 1999), where Tauber promoted the foundational status of the ethics of medicine, and thus firmly placed science and technology in the employ of the moral mandate of health care. Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (MIT Press 2005) extended this argument with a description of "relational autonomy" to define the moral status of the patient, coupled with advocacy of patient-centered medicine.

Selected Books

• Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2005.

• Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: niversity of California Press, 2001. (Paperback 2003)

• Confessions of a Medicine Man: An Essay in Popular Philosophy Cambridge: The MIT Press, A Bradford Book, 1999 (Paperback 2000). Awarded "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice (journal of the American Library Association) and First Prize, Allied Health category, by the American Medical Writers Association. Korean translation, 2004.

• The Immune Self: Theory or Metaphor? New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 (Paperback 1996). Italian translation, L'immunologia Dell'io, Milano: McGraw Hill Libri Italia, 1999.

• Gourko, H., Williamson, D.I. and Tauber, A.I. (Edited, translated, and annotated) The Evolutionary Biology Papers of Elie Metchnikoff. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000.

• Tauber A.I. and Chernyak L. Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology: From Metaphor to Theory New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Research

Tauber's principal philosophical interests concern the replacement of reified notions of science with an epistemology thoroughly melded with human-centered interests and intentions. In seeking a comprehensive understanding of scientific practice and application, Tauber promotes "moral epistemology", a philosophy that builds upon the collapse of the fact/value distinction to define the interplay of various values in the diversity of science's methodologies and interpretations. More specifically, he is concerned with the nature of knowing that translates objective knowledge into personal meaning. His Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (California 2001) illustrates the composite character of personal identity that such an approach presents, one in which moral agency broadly defines personal identity.

Personal

Tauber is married to Paula Fredriksen[1], the William Goodwin Aurelio Professor of the Appreciation of Scripture at Boston University.

Tauber has four children by a previous marriage to Alice Tauber: Joel, a performance artist [2]; Dylan, a multimedia artist [3],[4], Benjamin, a landscape architect, and Hana, an adult education teacher and political activist.

Alfred Tauber's extra-curricular activities focus on Amuta Moshe Hess, a charity he founded and directs, which provides services to mentally handicapped people in Israel.

Tauber is the son of deceased real estate magnate and surgeon Laszlo Tauber.