Professor of Philosophy; Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine
Director, Center for Philosophy and History of Science

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, Director of The Boston University Center for Philosophy and History of Science, and Affiliate Faculty in the Law, Medicine and Ethics Program. Dr. Tauber also holds two Visiting professorships in Israel. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he consults in medical curriculum reform, and at Tel Aviv University, 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. Dr. Tauber was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science in 1993. He offers courses in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology and medicine, and American philosophy. In 2008, Dr. Tauber was awarded the Science Medal from the Institute of Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna for his critical studies of immunology.

Aside from over 125 research publications in biochemistry and immunology, Dr. Tauber has published more than 80 papers on 19th and 20th century biomedicine, contemporary science studies, and ethics. He is the author of The Immune Self, Theory or Metaphor? (Cambridge, 1994), Confessions of a Medicine Man, An Essay in Popular Philosophy (MIT 1999), Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing (California 2001), Patient Autonomy and the Ethics of Responsibility (MIT 2005), and Science and its Quest for Meaning (Baylor University Press, 2009). In addition, he has co-authored Metchnikoff and the Origins of Immunology (Oxford, 1991) and The Generation of Diversity, Clonal Selection Theory and the Rise of Molecular Immunology (Harvard, 1997). He has also edited several volumes including The Elusive Synthesis: Science and Aesthetics (Kluwer, 1996), Science and the Quest for Reality (New York University, 1997), and a collaborative translation project, The Evolutionary Biology Papers of Elie Metchnikoff (Kluwer, 2000). On-going projects include further studies in theoretical immunology, medical ethics and medical philosophy, American Transcendentalism, and a philosophical study of psychoanalysis.