Alfred I. Tauber is Professor of Philosophy at the Boston University Department of Philosophy and Zoltan Kohn Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine. 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. Prof. Tauber served as Director of the Center for Philosophy and History of Science from 1993-2010, and during this period he offered courses in the history and philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology and medicine, and American philosophy.

Dr. Tauber is a hematologist and biochemist by training. He served an internship and residency at the University of Washington Affiliated Hospitals, followed by advanced training at Tufts-New England Medical Center, Brigham and Women¹s Hospital (Boston) and MIT. He spent four years on the faculty at Harvard Medical School before joining Boston University School of Medicine in 1982. Aside from over 125 research papers in immunology, biochemistry, and cell biology, Dr. Tauber has published extensively on 19th and 20th century biomedicine, contemporary science studies, and ethics. While working in the context of philosophy of science, this latter work more closely aligns with the history of ideas and moral philosophy, where the philosophical problems associated with personal identity, the value structure of science, and the attempts to find coherence in a world fragmented by competing notions of truth have required an inter-disciplinary approach.

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), Science and its Quest for Meaning (Baylor University Press, 2009), and Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher (Princeton, 2010). 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 The Evolutionary Biology Papers of Elie Metchnikoff (Kluwer, 2000).