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

A Summary of Research Interests:

I have written on seemingly diverse subjects, but I regard each connected by
the problem of translating scientific knowledge into personal meaning.  Most
directly I have explored this challenge by examining the history of
positivism from the  19th century into our own era. Science and the Quest
for Meaning characterizes contemporary science in this context.  Building on
my intellectual study, Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing,
I present a humanistic account of science in modern Western societies.
Thoreau's reaction to the professionalization of science and the ascendancy
of new forms of objectivity served to frame a theme about science's larger
meanings and the efforts required to integrate the scientific picture of
reality with human subjectivity.  This study formulated a romantic
conception of personal identity that asserted an active response to nihilism
and a credo of imaginative individuality that offers a powerful antidote to
postmodern notions. The portrait of Thoreau built upon earlier studies of
personal identity, framed by the problem of selfhood in immunology. While
immunology is generally depicted as the science of self/nonself
discrimination, I see the science as addressing the basic problem of
establishing identity.  If "identity" precedes "integrity" (defense), then
we see immunity against pathogens as a specialized activity of a broader
communication system.  Having decided the "immune self" was a metaphor and
that selfhood was a moral category, I pursued that theme in medical ethics.
Confessions of a Medicine Man is a testament to my own professional
awakening  of the physician's moral identity, which led to Patient Autonomy
and the Ethics of Responsibility.  In this latter work, notions of selfhood
define both the place of autonomy in the clinical setting and professional
responses to the ethical dilemma raised by extrapolating a political
identity to the clinic.

I call my guiding philosophy, a "moral-epistemology," which I define as the
inextricable weaving of values in our knowledge and ways of knowing, and
that those values not only evolve over time and culture, but are at play as
each of us constructs the world in which we live. Understanding this process
offers us potential freedom and moral responsibility.  This claim is
exemplified in my latest book, Freud, the Reluctant Philosopher, which will
be published by Princeton University Press in 2010.

While I work in the context of philosophy of science, my work more closely
aligns with the history of ideas and moral philosophy.  The problems that
intrigue me -- personal identity, the value structure of science, and the
attempts 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,
and while I acknowledge that a bioethicist might not appreciate how
discussions of patient autonomy relate to Thoreau's career or how a study of
psychoanalysis complements my description of immunological theory, at least
for me everything is of one piece.