_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. (shrink)

The evolution of color categorization systems is investigated by simulating categorization games played by a population of artificial agents. The constraints placed on individual agent’s perception and cognition are minimal and involve limited color discriminability and learning through reinforcement. The main dynamic mechanism for population evolution is pragmatic in nature: There is a pragmatic need for communication between agents, and if the results of such communications have positive consequences in their shared world then the agents involved are positively rewarded, whereas (...) if the results have negative consequences, then involved agents are punished. A mechanism for changing the composition of the population due to agents’ birth and death is also investigated. This birth-death mechanism is found to effectively move an established population color naming system toward a theoretically more optimal one. The simulation results of this article provide insights regarding mechanisms that may constrain universal tendencies in human color categorization systems observed in the linguistic and anthropological literatures. (shrink)

Researchers have evaluated how broad categories of emotion influence judgments of learning relative to neutral items. Specifically, JOLs are typically higher for emotional relative to neutral items. The novel goal of the present research was to evaluate JOLs for fine-grained categories of emotion. Participants studied faces with afraid, angry, sad, or neutral expressions and with afraid, angry, or sad expressions. Participants identified the expressed emotion, made a JOL for each, and completed a recognition test. JOLs were higher for the emotional (...) relative to neutral expressions. However, JOLs were insensitive to the categories of negative emotion. Using a survey design in Experiment 3, participants demonstrated idiosyncratic beliefs about emotion. Some people believed the fine-grained emotions were equally memorable, whereas others believed a specific emotion was most memorable. Thus, beliefs about emotion are nuanced, which has important implications for JOL theory. (shrink)

In Western society, weight moralization is reflected in the belief that weight is controllable across the weight spectrum. However, the effect of holding such beliefs is unclear. We therefore propose that these beliefs affect people differently depending on their BMI. When confronted with negative, self-related feedback, people’s coping strategies are often reflected in the ways they relate to their self. We examine three such self-to-self relations (i.e., reassured, inadequate, and hated self). Extending prior research, we predict that weight controllability beliefs (...) are related to positive self-to-self relations for adults with a low, and to negative self-to-self relations for adults with a high BMI. Accordingly, we expected that weight controllability beliefs would be associated with defensive avoidance among people with a high, but not with a low BMI. We tested our hypotheses in a sample of 348 adults who participated in an online survey. Weight controllability beliefs were associated with increased defensive avoidance in people with high BMI, and with decreased defensive avoidance in adults with a low BMI. Forms of self-to-self relating fully mediated this association, demonstrating positive effects on adults with a low, and negative effects on adults with a high BMI. Additionally, in an open ending section, we found seven social settings that deprive people from satisfying their need to belong and to be accepted due to their weight. We discuss our findings against a call for a less moralized public discourse about overweight and obesity that is particularly relevant in the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic. (shrink)

Over time, there has been a steady increase of workplace health promotion programs that aim to promote employees’ health and fitness. Previous research has focused on such program’s effectiveness, cost-savings, and barriers to engaging in workplace health promotion. The present research focuses on a downside of workplace health promotion programs that to date has not been examined before, namely the possibility that they, due to a focus on individual responsibility for one’s health, inadvertently facilitate stigmatization and discrimination of people with (...) overweight in the workplace. Study 1 shows that the presence of workplace health promotion programs is associated with increased attributions of weight controllability. Study 2 experimentally demonstrates that workplace health promotion programs emphasizing individual rather than organizational responsibility elicit weight stigma. Study 3, which was pre-registered, showed that workplace health promotion programs emphasizing individual responsibility induced weight-based discrimination in the context of promotion decisions in the workplace. Moreover, focusing on people with obesity who frequently experience weight stigma and discrimination, Study 3 showed that workplace health promotion programs highlighting individual responsibility induced employees with obesity to feel individually responsible for their health, but at the same time made them perceive weight as less controllable. Together, our research identifies workplace health promotion programs as potent catalysts of weight stigma and weight-based discrimination, especially when they emphasize individual responsibility for health outcomes. As such, we offer valuable insights for organizations who aim to design and implement workplace health promotion programs in an inclusive, non-discriminatory way that benefits all employees. (shrink)

Given immunity’s general role in the organism’s economy—both in terms of its internal environment as well as mediating its external relations—immune theory has expanded its traditional formulation of preserving individual autonomy to one that includes accounting for nutritional processes and symbiotic relationships that require immune tolerance. When such a full ecological alignment is adopted, the immune system becomes the mediator of both defensive and assimilative environmental intercourse, where a balance of immune rejection and tolerance governs the complex interactions of the (...) organism’s ecological relationships. Accordingly, immunology, which historically had affiliated with the biology of individuals, now becomes a science concerned with the biology of communities. With this translocation, the ontological basis of the organism is undergoing a profound change. Indeed, the recent recognition of the ubiquity of symbiosis has challenged the traditional notions of biological individuality and requires a shift in the metaphysics undergirding biology, in which a philosophy of the organism must be characterized by ecological dialectics “all-the-way-down.”. (shrink)

This is one of the first books in a new series that will publish the very best work in the philosophy of biology. The series will be non-sectarian in character, will extend across the broadest range of topics, and will be genuinely interdisciplinary. 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 analysed. 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 moulded this sophisticated modern science. (shrink)

This is one of the first books in a new series that will publish the very best work in the philosophy of biology. The series will be non-sectarian in character, will extend across the broadest range of topics, and will be genuinely interdisciplinary. 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 analysed. 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 moulded this sophisticated modern science. (shrink)

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 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 and values 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. (shrink)

In Immunity, Alfred Tauber sets forth a new theory of immunology that rejects the common principle of self and non-self, and the immune system's role as a protector of the self from external threats. Rather than serving to defend an independent entity, he argues, immunity participates in a large, complex eco-system of porous and flexible boundaries. Tauber's new approach to immunology necessitates a new biology in which symbiosis is the rule, not the exception.

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. (shrink)

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

Alfred I. Tauber (ed.), Organism and the Origins of Self. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. xix + 384 pp., US$ 110.00 (US$ 25.00 paperback). This is a fascinating book based on a 1990 symposium at Boston University. It promises to change the way one conceives of the organism. The authors start from different specializations but provide a most tantalizing feast of ideas. Richard Lewontin commences the book with a strange foreword. Lewontin submits that the concern with the "self (...) and private identity in modern biology is ... only one manifestation of the ideology of individualism that is a shibboleth of our particular [bourgeois] form of social organization" (p. xix). If this is the case, the reader should stop reading the book and ask for her money back. But I advise patience. Tauber's introduction is a mixture of the history of the medical notion of disease and the advocacy of a dialectical concept of the self as the interpenetration of part and whole. Tauber highlights Elie Metchnikoff's appealing idea of phagocytosis as just one form of the active organism striving to attain harmony among competing cells. (shrink)

Generalizing the work of Einstein and Mayer, it is assumed that at each point of space-time there exists an N-dimensional linear vector space with N≥5. This space is decomposed into a four-dimensional tangent space and an (N - 4)-dimensional internal space. On the basis of geometric considerations, one arrives at a number of fields, the field equations being derived from a variational principle. Among the fields obtained there are the electromagnetic field, Yang-Mills gauge fields, and fields that can be interpreted (...) as describing matter. As a simple example, the case N=6 is considered. (shrink)

In biology, the ‘ecological orientation' rests on a commitment to examining systems, and the conceptual challenge of defining that system now employs techniques and concepts adapted from diverse disciplines (i.e., systems philosophy, cybernetics, information theory, computer science) that are applied to biological simulations and model building. Immunology has joined these efforts, and the question posed here is whether the discipline will remain committed to its theoretical concerns framed by the notions of protecting an insular self, an entity demarcated from its (...) environment, or will shift its focus of interest to a wider context. An ecological perspective emphasizes the interchange between the organism and its environment, the processing of information, and the regulation arising from responses to this larger context. Moving from the first attempts at modeling the immune system as a closed network, immunologists have joined the general interest in systems analysis, and that move might portend a significant shift to an open, more holistic consideration of immune regulation. *Received December 2006; revised August 2007. †To contact the author, please write to: Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University, 745 Commonwealth Ave., Boston, MA 02215; e-mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

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 Kohák, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.

This collection of essays ranges from phenomenological descriptions of the beautiful in science to analytical explorations of the philosophical conjunction of ...

According to immunology’s prevailing paradigm, immunity is based on self/nonself discrimination and thus requires a construction of identity. Two orientations vie for dominance: The original conception, conceived in the context of infectious diseases, regards the organism as insular and autonomous, an entity that requires defense of its borders. An alternate view places the organism firmly in its environment in which both benign and onerous encounters occur. On this latter relational account, active tolerance allows for cooperative relationships with other organisms in (...) the larger ecological economy. These contending orientations —one derived from biomedicine and the other from the ecological sciences— have drawn the attention of social scientists and culture critics. On the one hand, feminists have portrayed immune theory as based upon borrowed social notions of identity that reflect male aggressive values and thus distort more balanced accounts of immunity; and, on the other hand, other commentary projects immune theory as a framework in which analysis of Western societies putatively reveals analogous patterns of ‘self’ and ‘other’ interactions, where autoimmunity and immunization are understood as expressions of the insular understanding of identity. Here, a meta-interpretation is presented that shows how these critiques place the immune self on a spectrum stretching from its formulation as an autonomous agent, a modernist conception of the independent individual, to a postmodern portrayal in which this conception of selfhood has been deconstructed. Accordingly, immunology is drawn into a wide-ranging debate about agency, where differing interpretations of immunity serves as a template in which competing understandings of human social intercourse is modeled.Según el paradigma dominante en inmunología, la inmunidad está basada en la discriminación entre yo/noyo y requiere, por tanto, una construcción de la identidad. Dos orientaciones compiten por dominar: la concepción original, concebida en el contexto de las enfermedades infecciosas contempla al organismo como aislado y autónomo, como una entidad que necesita defender sus fronteras. Una visión alternativa sitúa firmemente al organismo en su entorno, en el cual suceden tanto encuentros beneficiosos como costosos. En este enfoque relacional, la tolerancia activa permite relaciones cooperativas con otros organismos en una economía ecológica más amplia. Estas orientaciones en liza —una derivada de la biomedicina y otra de las ciencias ecológicas— han llamado la atención de los científicos sociales y de los críticos de la cultura. Por una parte, el feminismo ha descrito la teoría inmunológica como basada en nociones sociales prestadas de identidad que reflejan los valores agresivos del macho y que, de este modo, impiden una explicación más equilibrada de la inmunidad. Por otra parte, otro comentario proyecta la teoría inmunológica como un marco en el que el análisis de las sociedades occidentales revela aparentemente patrones análogos de interacciones ‘yo’ y ‘otros’, en las que la autoinmunidad y la inmunización son entendidas como expresiones de la comprensión insular de la identidad. Se ofrece aquí una meta-representación que muestra cómo estas críticas sitúan al yo inmune en un espectro que va desde su formulación cómo un agente autónomo, una concepción modernista del individuo independiente, a una visión postmoderna en la que esta concepción de la identidad ha sido deconstruida. De acuerdo con esto, la inmunología recoge un amplio debate sobre la agencia en el que diferentes interpretaciones de la inmunidad sirven como molde en el que se modelan comprensiones competidoras de la comprensión de las relaciones sociales humanas. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Introduction: Concerning scientific reason -- General themes -- Narrative plan -- What is science? -- Reason in dispute -- Rebuttal to an unfair indictment -- Science and the quest for reality -- Science and its values -- Nineteenth-century positivism -- The argument -- Cultures -- The human sciences -- The fall of positivism -- Polany : personalizing knowledge -- Kuhn : raising the lid of pandora's box -- Quine and the dismantling of logical positivism -- The constructivist challenge -- The (...) science wars -- Battles in the night -- The character of reason -- Taking stock -- Science in its socio-political contexts -- Disentangling facts and values, again -- Science as politics -- Science and human nature -- Science and culture -- A case study : environmentalism -- Claims for a science-based ethics -- Teleology -- Environmentalism's religious origins -- Conclusion: The challenge of coherence -- Science as a world view -- Bridging the divide -- A moral epistemology -- The search for meaning. (shrink)

Generalizing the work of Einstein and Mayer, it is assumed that at each point of space-time there exists a vector-spinor space with Nv vector dimensions and Ns spinor dimensions, where Nv=2k and Ns=2 k, k⩾3. This space is decomposed into a tangent space with4 vector and4 spinor dimensions and an internal space with Nv−4 vector and Ns−4 spinor dimension. A variational principle leads to field equations for geometric quantities which can be identified with physical fields such as the electromagnetic field, (...) Yang-Mills gauge fields, and wave functions of bosons and fermions. (shrink)

The ArgumentTwo research traditions in immunology, supposedly centered on the same issue of immune identification, have followed different theoretical goals and originated form competing phillosophical foundations. these may be labelled modernist and postmodernist, respectively, thereby applying cultural and philosophical categories to immunology in order to articulate potential scientific resonances with the broader culture. To accept that exercise and important caveat is imposed, namely, this translation is most appropriately discussed at the level of metaphor. In other words, I will structure my (...) treatment of these issues as expressed in the metaphorical language of the disipline, and thus the bulk of this discussion will focus on how the language and modeling of the science draws from the culture-at-large. Scientists seek images from their eveir everyday lives to describe phenomena that may be poorly articulated in their technical discourse; such is the utility and importance of metaphors generally, and thus it is not surprising that we might discern echoes of a postmodernist sentiment in the metaphors borrowed from post–World War II culture. I Will also discuss, to a more limited extent, how postmodernists have sought support for their own ideological arguments in immunology. This last topic server only to illustrate the bidirectionality of scientific discourse with the society in which it is embedded. (shrink)

Freud (and later commentators) have failed to explain how the origins of psychoanalytical theory began with a positivist investment without recognizing a dual epistemological commitment: simply, Freud engaged positivism because he believed it generally equated with empiricism, which he valued, and he rejected ‘philosophy’, and, more specifically, Kantianism, because of the associated transcendental qualities of its epistemology. But this simple dismissal belies a deep investment in Kant’s formulation of human reason, in which rationality escapes natural cause and thereby bestows humans (...) with cognitive and moral autonomy. Freud also segregated human rationality: he divided the mind between (1) an unconscious grounded in the biological and thus subject to its own laws, and (2) a faculty of autonomous reason, lodged in consciousness and free of natural forces to become the repository of interpretation and free will. Psychoanalysis thus rests upon a basic Kantian construction, whereby reason, through the aid of analytic techniques, provides a detached scrutiny of the natural world, i.e. the unconscious mental domain. Further, sovereign reason becomes the instrument of self-knowing in the pursuit of human perfection. Herein lies the philosophical foundation of psychoanalytic theory, a beguiling paradox in which natural cause and autonomous reason — determinism and freedom — are conjoined despite their apparent logical exclusion. (shrink)

Contemporary immunology has established its fundamental theory as a biological expression of personal identity, wherein the "immune self" is defended by the immune system. Protection of this agent putatively requires a cognitive capacity by which the self and the foreign are perceived and thereby discriminated; from such information, discernment of the environment is achieved and activation of pathways leading to an immune response may be initiated. This so-called cognitive paradigm embeds such functions as "perception," "recognition," "learning," and "memory" to characterize (...) immune processes, but the conceptual character of such functions has meanings that vary with the particular theory adopted. When different formulations of cognition are considered, immunology's conceptual infrastructure shifts: Extensions of conventional psychological understanding of representational cognition based on a subject-object dichotomy support notions of immune agency; alternatively, formulations of perception that dispense with representations and attendant notions of agency reconfigure the predicate epistemology dominating current immune theory. Reviewing immunological literature of the past five decades, these two understandings of perception – representational and non-representational – offer competing views of immune cognitive functions. These, in turn, provide competing philosophical understandings of immunology's conceptual foundations, which reflect parallel controversies dominating current debates in philosophy of mind and attendant discussions about personal identity. (shrink)

Contemporary American medical ethics was born during a period of social ferment, a key theme of which was the espousal of individual rights. Driven by complex cultural forces united in the effort to protect individuality and self-determined choices, an extrapolation from case law to rights of patients was accomplished under the philosophical auspices of ‘autonomy’. Autonomy has a complex history; arising in the modern period as the idea of self-governance, it received its most ambitious philosophical elaboration in Kant's moral philosophy. (...) In examining the Kantian construction, it is evident that neither his universal moral imperative nor his rigorous application of self-legislated ethical action can sustain our own notions of moral agency in a pragmatic, pluralistic society. But the Kantian position is useful in highlighting that self-governance is not equivalent to ‘autonomy’, and this distinction defines the limits of autonomy in the clinical setting. A critique of Engelhardt's idea of ‘principle of permission’ is used to illustrate autonomy's eclipse as a governing principle for medical ethics. (shrink)

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, (...) focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freudianism rests has been deconstructed. Thus the debate that begins with Freud’s social theories reflects the deeper divisions, which arose with postmodern ethics and discarded Cartesian–Kantian notions of personal identity. Here we consider the moral framework in which Freudian social theory sits and a contrasting understanding of agency that confronts his modernist conception. In that debate, we discern the larger humanist confrontation with postmodernity. Yet, all who engaged Freud shared some version of his utopian ethos, albeit radically restructuring the theory upon which social reform might occur. (shrink)

Acknowledging the power of the id-drives, Freud held on to the authority of reason as the ego’s best tool to control instinctual desire. He thereby placed analytic reason at the foundation of his own ambivalent social theory, which, on the one hand, held utopian promise based upon psychoanalytic insight, and, on the other hand, despaired of reason’s capacity to control the self-destructive elements of the psyche. Moving beyond the recourse of sublimation, post-Freudians attacked reason’s hegemony in quelling disruptive psycho-dynamics and, (...) focusing upon the social domain, they sought strategies to counter the oppressive (repressive) social restrictions and conformist impositions impeding individual freedom that result from thwarted desire. Postmodern celebration of desire at the expense of reason and sublimation leaves the Enlightenment prospects altogether and moves psychoanalysis into a new terrain, where the very notion of rationality and an autonomous ego upon which much of Freudianism rests has been deconstructed. Thus the debate that begins with Freud’s social theories reflects the deeper divisions, which arose with postmodern ethics and discarded Cartesian–Kantian notions of personal identity. Here we consider the moral framework in which Freudian social theory sits and a contrasting understanding of agency that confronts his modernist conception. In that debate, we discern the larger humanist confrontation with postmodernity. Yet, all who engaged Freud shared some version of his utopian ethos, albeit radically restructuring the theory upon which social reform might occur. (shrink)