Discovering Life
Princeton University Program in History of Science Workshop
Organized by Angela N. H. Creager and Daniel Garber
Feb. 8-9, 2008 – 211 Dickinson Hall
This workshop will consider how natural philosophers and scientists have thought about (and experimented with) life over the last two thousand years or so. How has the conception of life related to other convictions and concerns, whether scientific, medical, intellectual, cultural, or political? How have technologies and ways of manipulating living materials changed the understanding of life itself? How have the slippages in the meaning of “life” been subversive to, or perhaps generative of, biological knowledge?
Schedule
Click on participant names to view paper abstracts.Friday, Feb. 8
8:45 am Coffee and bagels available in 210 Dickinson Hall
Session 1: Life Between Machine and Technology
9:30-11:00 a.m. papers:- Gideon Manning, California Institute of Technology, “Cartesian Anthropocentrism: Why Living Machines were Different and Why It Mattered”
- Hannah Landecker, Rice University, “Life In Vitro”
11:30 am-12:30 pm Commentary and discussion
- Commentator: John Tresch, University of Pennsylvania
12:45 pm Lunch for registered participants at Prospect House
Session 2: Life, Death, and Medicine
2:30-4:00 pm papers:- Nancy Siraisi, CUNY, “Human Life Span, Length of Life, and the Powers of Medicine: Some Fourteenth to Early Seventeenth Century Views”
- Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Indiana University, “Experimenting on Live Animals: A Taxonomy of Vivisections in the 17th Century”
4:30-5:30 pm Commentary, and discussion
- Commentator: Harold Cook, Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, London
6:30 pm Dinner reception in 1879 Hall
Saturday, Feb. 9
8:45 am Coffee and bagels available in 210 Dickinson Hall
Session 3: Visualizing Evolution
9:30-11:00 a.m. papers:- Jessica Riskin, Stanford University, “The Divine Optician”
- Robert Richards, University of Chicago, “Objectivity in the Visualization of Life: The Charges of Fraud against Ernst Haeckel”
11:30 am-12:30 pm Commentary and discussion
- Commentator: Jeff Schwegman, Princeton University
12:30 pm Lunch for registered participants in 210 Dickinson
Session 4: A Science of Life?
2:00-3:30 pm papers:- James G. Lennox, University of Pittsburgh, “Aristotle on the Prospects for a Theoretical Science of Life”
- V. Betty Smocovitis, University of Florida, “Carl Sagan, The Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the Meaning of ‘Life’ in the Mid-Twentieth Century”
4:00-5:30 pm Paper, commentary, and discussion
- Michel Morange, École Normale Supérieure, “The Resurrection of Life”
- Commentator: Daniel Cloud, Society of Fellows, Princeton University
Sponsored by the Program in History of Science and the Department of Philosophy
To register for lunches, contact Amy Shortt (ashortt@princeton.edu)
All paper abstracts are available here.