People > Faculty

JAMIE COHEN-COLE

Lecturer and Post-Doctoral Fellow
Ph.D. Princeton University, 2003

Fishbein Center for History of Science
1126 E. 59th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 302-3708

Email: jamiecc@uchicago.edu

Jamie Cohen-Cole does research and teaches in the history of cognitive psychology and cybernetics.

Publications include:

• Thinking About Thinking in Cold War America, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2003

• "The Reflexivity of Cognitive Science: The (Cognitive) Scientist as Model of Nature, "History of Human Sciences (forthcoming)
• "Making Minds and Social Relations for a Democratic America: The Politics of Thinking," forthcoming.

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JEAN COMAROFF

The Bernard E. & Ellen C. Sunny Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology

jcomaro@midway.uchicago.edu

Jean Comaroff has conduced fieldwork in southern Africa and Great Britain and is interested in the relations among ritual, power, and history. Her specific foci of study have included the religion of the Southern Tswana peoples (past and present); colonialism and Christian evangelism in southern Africa; and healing, bodily practice, and the nature of resistance. Her current research concerns the making of local worlds in the wake of global "modernity" and commodification.

Publications include:

• (with J.L. Comaroff) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1992).
• (ed., with J.L. Comaroff) Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual and Power in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
• "The Empire's Old Clothes: Refashioning the Colonial Subject," in D. Howes (ed.), Commodities and Cultural Borders (Routledge,1996).
• Nightmares of the Global Village: Witchcraft, Child Abuse, and Crises of Reproduction.
• Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier, Vol. I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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LORRAINE DASTON

Visiting Professor in History

Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and Vistiting Professor in the Department of History and the Committee on Social Thought. She has published with Katharine Park Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998), and is at work on another book with Peter Galison on The Images of Objectivity. In spring 1999 she gave the Sir Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford University on "The History of Objectivity".

Publications include:

• "The Moral Economy of Science", Osiris 10 (1995): 3-24.
• "L'esperienza scientifica e le sue possibile storie," Quaderni Storici 96(1997): 831-838.
• "The Cold Light of Facts and the Facts of Cold Light," in David Rubin, ed., Signs of Early Modern France (Charlottesville: Rockville Press, 1997), pp. 17-44.
• "Fear and Loathing of the Imagination in Science," Daedalus 127(1998): 73-95.
• "Nature by Design," in Caroline A Jones and Peter Galison, eds., Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York/London: Routledge, 1998), pp. 232-253.
• "The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe," Configurations 6(1998): 149-172.
• "Probability and Evidence," in Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, eds. Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2, pp. 1108-1144.
• Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 1998).
• The Moral Authority of Nature, edited with Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

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ARNOLD DAVIDSON

Professor of Philosophy.
Ph.D. Harvard University. 1981.

jg30@midway.uchicago.edu

Department of Philosophy
The University of Chicago
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8513 -- department
(773) 702-9861 -- fax
(773) 702-9849 -- office

Arnold Davidson works in moral and political philosophy, the history and philosophy of psychiatry and medicine, contemporary French philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

Publications include:

• "Closing up the Corpses: Diseases of Sexuality and the Emergence of the Psychiatric Style of Reasoning," in G. Boolos, ed., Mind, Meaning and Method: Essays in Honor of Hilary Putnam (Cambridge University Press, 1991).
• "Is Rawls A Kantian?," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, January/April, 1985.
• "Archaeology, Genealogy, Ethics," in D. Hoy, ed., Foucault: A Critical Reader (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
• "How to Do the History of Psychoanalysis: A Reading of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality," Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1987.
• "Questions Concerning Heidegger," Critical Inquiry, Winter, 1989.
• "The Horror of Monsters" in J. Sheehan and M. Sosna, eds.,Human, Animals and Machines (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991)
• "Reading Hadot Reading Plotinus", Introduction to Pierre Hadot. Plotinus or the Simplicity of Vision (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1993).
• "Ethics as Ascetics: Foucault, the History of Ethics and Ancient Thought," in J. Goldstein, ed.,Foucault (London: Basil Blackwell, 1994).
• The Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts. (Cambridge: Havard University of Press, 2001).

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ALLEN DEBUS

Morris Fishbein Professor Emeritus of the History of Science and Medicine.

adebus@midway.uchicago.edu

I have published extensively on Renaissance and Early Modern science and medicine and have received the Dexter Award of the American Chemical Society, the Edward Kremers Award of the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy and the Sarton Medal for lifetime achievment of the History of Science Society. In 1985, I was given an honorary D.Sc. from the Catholic University of Louvain. At present I am completing a book manuscript on the medical debates involing chemistry in the century 1650-1750.

Among my books are:

• The English Paracelsians (1965)
• Science and Education in the 17th Century (1970)
• The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the 16th and 17th Centuries (2 vols., 1977). Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society (1978) and translated into Japanese.
• Man and Nature in the Renaissance (1978). Translated into Italian, Greek, Spanish, Chinese and Japanese.
• Robert Fludd and His Philosophicall Key (1979)
• Science and History: A Chemist's Appraisal (1984)
• Chemistry, Alchemy and the New Philosophy 1550-1700 (1987)
• The French Paracelsians (1991)
• Paracelso e la Tradizione Paracelsiana (1996)

As editor:

• Elias Ashmole's Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)(1967)
• Science, Medicine and Society in the Renaissance. Essays to Honor Walter Pagel (2 vols., 1972)
• Medicine in 17th Century England. The C.D. O'Malley International Symposium (1974)
• John Dee's The Mathematicall Praeface (1570)(1975)
• Hermeticism in the Renaissance (1988). Co-edited with Ingrid Merkel.
• Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution (1998). Co-edited with Michael T. Walton.

Festschrift:

• Experiencing Nature: Proceedings of a Conference in Honor of Allen G. Debus, edited by Paul H. Theerman and Karen Hunger Parshall (1997)

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JAN GOLDSTEIN

Professor of History.
Ph.D. Columbia University. 1978.
Department of History

The University of Chicago
1126 East 59th Street, Mailbox 87
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8397 -- department
(773) 702-7550 -- fax
(773) 702-8388 -- office
E-Mail: jegoldst@midway.uchicago.edu

Jan Goldstein's research and teaching focus on the history of Europe, especially France, from the 18th through the 20th centuries, with an emphasis on the development of the human sciences. She is interested in the multiplicity of ways that formal systems of thought, including the human sciences, are related to socio-political institutions that produce and make use of them.

Publications include:

• Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 1987; paperback ed., 1990.
• Foucault and the Writing of History (Editor). Blackwell, 1994.
• "Foucault among the Sociologists: The 'Disciplines' and the History of Professions." History and Theory. 1984.
• "The Uses of Male Hysteria: Medical and Literary Discourse in Nineteenth-Century France." Representations. 1991.
• "Foucault and the Post-Revolutionary Self: The Uses of Cousinian Pedagogy in 19th-Century France," in Goldstein, ed., Foucault and the Writing of History (Blackwell, 1994)
• "Saying 'I': Victor Cousin, Caroline Angebert, and the Politics of Selfhood in 19th-Century France," in Michael S. Roth, ed., Rediscovering History (Stanford, 1994)
• "The Advent of Psychological Modernism in France: An Alternate Narrative," in Dorothy Ross, ed., Modernist Impulses in the Human Sciences. 1870-1930 (Johns Hopkins, 1994)
• "Enthusiasm or Imagination? Eighteenth-Century Smear Words in Comparative National Context," Huntington Library Quarterly 60 (1998): 29-49
• "Mutations of the Self in Old Regime and Post-Revolutionary France: From Ame to Moi to Le Moi," in Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 86-116

She is presently completing a book tentatively titled The Post-Revolutionary Self which investigates three competing psychological theories -- sensationalism, the philosophical psychology of Victor Cousin, and phrenology -- which made intensive bids for institutionalization in 19th-century France and hence reveal a good deal about the politics of selfhood in that era.

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ADRIAN JOHNS

Associate Professor of History
Ph.D. Cambridge, 1992.

johns@midway.uchicago.edu

Field specialties: History of science; British history; history of the book.

Adrian Johns is an associate professor in the Department of History and the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (University of Chicago Press, 1998), which won the Leo Gershoy Award of the American Historical Association, the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies, the Louis Gottschalk Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the SHARP Prize for the best work on the history of authorship, reading and publishing. He has also published widely in the history of science and the history of the book. Educated in Britain at the University of Cambridge, Professor Johns has taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury, the University of California, San Diego, and the California Institute of Technology. He is currently working on a history of intellectual piracy from the invention of printing to the Internet.

Publications include:

• The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. University of Chicago Press, 1998.
• "The Past, Present, and Future of the Scientific Book," and "The Physiology of Reading." N. Jardine and M. Frasca-Spada (eds.), Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 408-26, 291-314.
• "Miscellaneous Methods: Authors, Societies and Journals in Early Modern England." British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000), 159-86.
• "Identity, Practice, and Trust in Early Modern Natural Philosophy." Historical Journal 42 (1999), 1125-45.
• "Science and the Book in Modern Cultural Historiography." Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29 (1998), 167-94.
• "Prudence and Pedantry in Early Modern Cosmology: The Trade of Al Ross." History of Science 35 (1997), 23-59.
• "Flamsteed's Optics and the Identity of the Astronomical Observer." In F. Willmoth (ed.), Flamsteed's Stars (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1997), 77-106.
• "Natural History as Print Culture." In N. Jardine, J. Secord, E. Spary (eds.), Cultures of Natural History: from Curiosity to Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 106-24.

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DONALD LEVINE

The Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Sociology

dlok@midway.uchicago.edu

Donald Levine studies sociology, including its theory and history; he has particular interests in Ethiopian society and the work of Georg Simmel. He also edits the Heritage of Sociology series published by the University of Chicago press.

Publications include:

• Visions of the Sociological Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
• "Simmel and Parsons Reconsidered," American Journal of Sociology 796 (1991), 1097-1116; also in Ronald Robertson, Bryan S. Turner, eds., Talcott Parsons: Theorist of Modernity (London: Sage, 1991).
• "The organism metaphor in sociology," Social Research 62 (1995), 239-265.
• "Sociology and the Nation-State in an Era of Shifting Boundries," Sociological Inquiry 66 (1996), 253-66.
• "On Visions and Its Critics." History of the Human Sciences 10 (1996), 212-217.
• 2000b. "On the Critique of 'Utilitarian' Theories of Action: Newly Identified Convergences among Simmel, Weber, and Parsons." Theory Culture and Society 17(1): 63-78.

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HOWARD MARGOLIS

Professor of Public Policy

hmarg@uchicago.edu

Howard Margolis's major research interest is in social theory, particularly the underpinnings of individual choice and judgment, which shape aggregate social outcomes. His new book on the origin of the Scientific Revoution will appear in April. Prior to his academic career, Margolis worked in Washington D.C., as a journalist, official, and consultant. He was the founder of the "News & Comment" section of Science, a correspondent for the Washington Post and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, speech-writer for the secretary of defense, and consultant to the National Academy of Sciences on studies of major public policy issues.

Publications include:

• Paradigms and Barriers: How Habits of Mind Govern Scientific Belief (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
• Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
• Dealing with Risk: Why the Public and the Experts Disagree on Environmental Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
• "Tycho's system and Galileo's `Dialogue'", Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 22 (1991), 259-275.
• It Started with Copernicus: How turning the world inside out led to the Scientific Revolution (McGraw-Hill, 2002).

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IAN MUELLER

Professor of Philosophy emeritus

i-mueller@uchicago.edu

Publications include:

• Philosophy of Mathematics and Deductive Structure in Euclid's Elements (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981),
• "The triangles in Plato's Timaeus," Mathesis 12 (1996), 286-333 (even pages)
• "Greek arithmetic, geometry, and harmonics: Thales to Plato," in C.C.W. Taylor (ed.), The Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. I, from the beginning to Plato (London and New York: Routledge) 1997, 271-322
• "Platonism and the study of nature (Phaedo 95e ff.)," in Jyl Gentzler (ed.), Method in Ancient Philosophy (Oxford: Clarnedon Press) 1998, 67-89
• "Plato's mathematical chemistry and its exegesis in antiquity," in Patrick Suppes, Julius M. Moravcsik, and Henry Mendell (eds.), Ancient and Medieval Traditions in the Exact Sciences (Stanford: CSLI Publications) 2000, 159-176

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ROBERT J. RICHARDS

The Morris Fishbein Professor of the History of Science and Medicine

Director of the Fishbein Center
Professor of History, Philosophy, and Psychology.
Ph.D. University of Chicago. 1978.

The Fishbein Center
The University of Chicago
1126 E. 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8348 -- office
(773) 743-8949 -- fax
E-Mail: r-richards@uchicago.edu

For further information, please go to: http://home.uchicago.edu/~rjr6/.

I do research in history and philosophy of psychology and biology. This includes particular interest in evolutionary biopsychology, ethology, and sociobiology, as well as theories of perception from the ancient period to the present day. Concerning philosophic and metahistoric problems, I have argued for a revaluation of evolutionary ethics and have developed a natural selection model for historiographic analysis. My recent research has been on the impact of the German Romantic movement on philosophy and science (particularly biology). I am currently at work on the development of evolutionary theory in Germany during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Publications include:

• Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Winner of the Pfizer Prize in the History of Science
• The Meaning of Evolution: The Morphological Construction and Ideological Reconstruction of Darwin's Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
• The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
• "Mind, Behavior, and Emotions," in Jonathan Hodge and Gregory Radick (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Darwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
• "The Erotic Authority of Nature: Nature, Science, and the Female during Goethe's Italian Journey," in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (University of Chicago Press, 2003).
• "Linguistic Creation of Man: Charles Darwin, August Schleicher, Ernst Haeckel, and the Missing Link in 19th-Century Evolutionary Theory," in Experimenting in Tongues: Studies in Science and Language, ed. Matthias Doerres (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001)
• "Psychology as a Humanism," Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 37 (2001): 61-66.
• "Kant and Blumenbach on the Bildungstrieb: A Historical Misunderstanding", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, 31 (2000): 11-32.
• "Darwin's Romantic Biology, the Foundation of his Evolutionary Ethics", in Biology and the Foundation of Ethics, ed. Jane Maienschein and Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1999).
• "The Epistemology of Historical Interpretation: Progressivity and Recapitulation in Darwin's Theory" in Epistemology and Biology, eds. Richard Creath and Jane Maienschein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 64-90.
• "Rhapsodies on a Cat-Piano, or Johann Christian Reil and the Foundations of Romantic Psychiatry", Critical Inquiry 24, no. 3 (spring, 1998): 700-736.
• "The Structure of Narrative Explanation in History and Biology," in History and Evolution, ed. M. Nitecki. Albany: SUNY, 1992.
• "A Defense of Evolutionary Ethics," in Philosophy and Biology, (1986) pp. 265-293; with replies by Cela-Conde, Gewirth Huges, Thomas, and Trigg.

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JOEL SNYDER

Professor of Art History

Joel Snyder's historical research centers on the history of photography, the history of perspective, and Medieval and Renaissance theories of vision. He also works on the theory of photography and film, critical theory, aesthetics and the theory of representation.

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STEPHEN M. STIGLER

The Ernest DeWitt Burton Distinguished Service Professor of Statistics

Department of Statistics
The University of Chicago
5734 University Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8333 -- department
(773) 702-9810 -- fax
(773) 702-8328 -- office
E-Mail: stigler@galton.uchicago.edu

Stephen M. Stigler is interested in the history of statistics and probability, from the appearance of early concepts in gambling, astronomy, and geodesy, to the development of statistical methods in social science and biology, including the ways those methods have helped to shape core ideas in these sciences. Some individual scientists who have been particularly influential in this history are Laplace, Gauss, Quetelet, Galton, Edgeworth, Karl and Egon Pearson, Ronald Fisher, Neyman, and Wald. A focus of current research is 20th century mathematical statistics. Another area of investigation is quantitative studies of the flow of information in science, including the use of citation-based measures to model the flow of intellectual influence in science.

Publications include:

• The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty before 1900. The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986.
• Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1999.

For a full list of over 140 publications, go to Stephen M. Stigler's home page: http://www.stat.uchicago.edu/~stigler/

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GEORGE STOCKING

Stein-Freiler Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of Anthropology.

Department of Anthropology
The University of Chicago
5836 S. Greenwood Ave
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-7701 -- department
(773) 702-4503 -- fax
(773) 702-7702 -- office
E-Mail: g-stocking@uchicago.edug-stocking@uchicago.edu

Research interests: Currently working on the history of anthropology in the United States from 1945 to 1972.

Publications include:

• Race, Culture, and Evolution. New York: Free Press. 1968
• Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press. 1987
• The Ethnographer's Magic. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1992.
• After Tylor: British Social Anthropology, 1888-1951. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. 1995.

as well as 11 edited volumes and numerous articles and reviews.

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NOEL M. SWERDLOW

Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and of History.

Astronomy & Astrophysics Center
The University of Chicago
5640 S. Ellis Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8212 -- fax
(773) 702-7969 -- office
E-Mail: nms@oddjob.uchicago.edu

My general field of research is the history of the exact sciences, particularly astronomy, from antiquity through the seventeenth century. Recently I have published a book called The Babylonian Theory of the Planets concerned principally with the derivation of the numerical parameters of the mathematical planetary theory from records of observations of the dates of the heliacal phenomena of the planets, as first and last visibilities. The study also considers the relation of Babylonian observational and mathematical astronomy to celestial divination, which was its principal motivation. My current project is a more or less comprehensive survey of astronomy in the Renaissance, concentrating on the most important astronomers of the period, Regiomontanus, Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, and Galileo.

Publications include:

• The Babylonian Theory of the Planets (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998)
• Noel M. Swerdlow and Otto Neugebauer, Mathematical Astronomy in Copernicus’s
  De Revolutionibus, 2 vols. (Springer-Verlag, 1984).
• "The Recovery of the Exact Sciences of Antiquity: Mathematics, Astronomy, Geography," Rome Reborn. The Vatican Library and Renaissance Culture, ed. A. Grafton, The Library of Congress, Yale University Press (1993), 125-67.
• "Otto E. Neugebauer," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 137 (1993), 139-65.
• "Montucla's Legacy: The History of the Exact Sciences," Journal of the History of Ideas (1993), 299-328.
• "Astronomy in the Renaissance," in C. Walker, ed., Astronomy before the Telescope (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996).
• "Galileo's Discoveries with the Telescope and Their Evidence for the Copernican Theory," The Cambridge Companion to Galileo, ed. P. Machamer. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
• "Planetary Theory from Eudoxus to Copernicus," Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics, (London: Macmillan, 2000).

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RUSSELL TUTTLE

Professor of Anthropology

r-tuttle@uchicago.edu

Russell Tuttle's research is focused on human and ape evolution and how studies of living apes might clarify the human condition. He has conducted field and experimental laboratory studies pertaining to the evolution of human and nonhuman primate morphology, locomotion, and other behavior. He is also engaged in paleoanthropology, particularly the evolution of bipedalism and of the human hand, and the history of theories of hominoid evolution and of social prejudice in physical anthropology. He is Editor of the International Journal of Primatology and of a new book series Developments in Primatology: Progress and Prospects (Kluwer Acedemic/Plenum Publishers).

Publications include:

• "What's new in African paleoanthropology?", Annual Reviews of Anthropology, 17 (1988), 391-426.
• (with D.M. Webb, N.I. Tuttle and M. Baksh) "Footprints and gaits of bipedal apes, bears, and barefoot people: perspectives on Pliocene tracks," pp. 221-242 of S. Matano et. al. eds., Topics in Primatology, vol. 3 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1992).
• "Hands from Newt to Napier," pp. 3-20 of S. Matano et. al. eds., Topics in Primatology, vol. 3 (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1992).
• "Up From Electromyography: Primate Energetics and the Evolution of Human Bipedalism," pp. 269-284 of R.S. Corruccini and R.L. Ciochon, eds., Integrative Paths to the Past: Paleoanthropological Advances in Honor of F. Clark Howell (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1994).
• "The Laetoli hominid G Footprints: Where do they stand today?", Kaupia 6 (1996).
• Fossils, Phylogenies and Feelings: Can Evolutionary Biology Contribute to the Great Ape Project? In Great Apes and Humans at an Ethical Frontier, edited by B.B. Beck et al. (Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC, 2001)
• On Culture and Traditional Chimpanzees. Current Anthropology 42(3):407-408 (2001).
• Entries on Physical Anthropology and Human Evolution for the Encyclopaedia Britannica

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WILLIAM C. WIMSATT

Professor of Philosophy, Committee on Evolutionary Biology, Committee on the Conceptual Foundations of Science
Ph.D. University of Pittsburgh. 1971.

Department of Philosophy
The University of Chicago
1010 East 59th Street
Chicago, IL 60637
(773) 702-8513 -- department
(773) 702-9861 -- fax
(773) 702-8598 -- office
E-Mail: wwim@midway.uchicago.edu

I work on methodological problems arising in the analysis of complex systems-especially in evolutionary biology, but also in various of the human and physical sciences. I have worked on problem solving strategies, model-building, on the structure of evolutionary genetics, functional organization and functional inference, levels of organization, chaos, the units of selection problem, and the role of development in evolution, extensively on reductionistic research strategies and their biases, and concepts of emergence. I have also written on the history of classical genetics, on the nature of scientific visualization, and the problems of scientific change. Currently, I am working especially on the role of development in evolution and on problems in the construction of adequate theories of cultural evolution.

Publications include:

• "Reductionistic research strategies and their biases in the units of selection controversy," in T. Nickles, ed., Scientific Discovery-vol. II: Case Studies. Dordrecht: Reidel. 1980, pp. 213-259.
• "Robustness: reliability and overdetermination," in M. Brewer and B. Collins, eds., Scientific Inquiry and the Social Sciences. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. 1981, pp. 124-163.
• "Developmental constraints: generative entrenchment, and the innate- acquired distinction," in P. W. Bechtel, ed., Integrating Scientific Disciplines. Dordrecht: Martinus-Nijhoff. 1986, pp. 85-208.
• "False Models as means to Truer Theories," in M. Nitecki, and A. Hoffman, eds., Neutral Models in Biology. London: Oxford University Press. 1987, pp. 23-55.
• Wimsatt, W. C., and J. C. Schank, "Two Constraints on the Evolution of Complex Adaptations and the Means for their Avoidance." Paper prepared for the 10th annual Spring Systematics Symposium of the Field Museum of Natural History, in M. Nitecki, ed., The Idea of Progress in Evolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1988, pp. 231-273.
• Griesemer, J. R., and W. C. Wimsatt, "Picturing Weismannism: A Case Study in Conceptual Evolution," in M. Ruse, ed., What Philosophy of Biology Is. (Festschrift for David Hull). Martinus-Nijhoff. 1989, pp. 75-137.
• "Taming the Dimensions-Visualizations in Science" in M. Forbes, L. Wessels, and A. Fine, eds, PSA-1990, volume 2; East Lansing: The Philosophy of Science Association. 1991, pp. 111-135.
• "Golden Generalities and Co-opted Anomalies: Haldane vs. Muller and the Drosophila group on the Theory and Practice of Linkage Mapping," in S. Sarkar, ed., The Founders of Evolutionary Genetics, Dordrecht: Martinus-Nijhoff. 1992, pp. 107-166.
• "The Ontology of Complex Systems: Levels, Perspectives and Causal Thickets", Canadian Journal of Philosophy supplementary volume #20, ed. Robert Ware and Mohan Matthen.1994, pp. 207-274.
• "Aggregativity: Reductive Heuristics for Finding Emergence," in L. Darden, ed., PSA-1996, v. 2 [Philosophy of Science, Supp Vol. #2, 1997]. 1997, pp. S372-S384.
• "Genes, Memes, and Cultural Inheritance," Biology and Philosophy. v. 14. 1999, 279-310.
• "Generativity, Entrenchment, Evolution, and Innateness," in V. Hardcastle, ed., Biology meets Psychology: philosophical essays MIT Press. 1999, 139-179.
• Re-Engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings: piecewise approximations to reality, Harvard University Press, forthcoming.
• "Generative Entrenchment and the Developmental Systems Approach to Evolutionary Processes," in S. Oyama, R. Gray and P. Griffiths, eds, Cycles of Contingency: Developmental Systems and Evolution, Cambridge: MIT Press, in press, 2000.

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ALISON WINTER

Associate Professor of History
The University of Chicago
773-702-2334--office
Foster 510
Email: awinter@midway.uchicago.edu

Her interests include the history of sciences of mind (and more broadly the human sciences) in Britain and America since the eighteenth century, the history of modern medicine, the historical construction of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in the sciences and medicine, and historical issues of gender. Her first book developed a social and cultural history of mesmerism in Victorian Britain. Her current research focuses on the scientific study and medical extraction of memory in America and Britain.

Publications include

• Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
• "A Calculus of Suffering: Ada Lovelace and the Corporeal Constraints on Women's Knowledge in Early Victorian England", in Christopher Lawrence and Stephen Shapin, eds., Science Incarnate: The physical presentation of intellectual selves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
• "The Construction of Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in the Early Victorian Life Sciences", B. Lightman (ed.), Victorian Science in Context, University of Chicago Press 1997.
• (With Anne Joseph), "Making the Match: The Hunt for Human Traces, the Scientific Expert and the Public Imagination", in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds., Cultural Babbage: Technology, time and invention, Faber and Faber (1996), pp. 193-214.
• "Compasses All Awry: The Iron Ship and the Ambiguities of Cultural Authority in Victorian England", Victorian Studies (Autumn 1994), 69-98
  

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