Program in History of Science, Princeton University
Organized by: Angela N. H. Creager and Daniel Garber
Times: Friday, February 8, and Saturday, February 9
9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., both days
Place: 211 Dickinson Hall, Princeton University
Registration: Contact Amy Shortt to register for the workshop, including lunches, ashortt@princeton.edu
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 for Saturday, February 9
9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Session 3. Visualizing Evolution
* 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”
* Commentator: Jeff Schwegman, Princeton University
2:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Session 4. A Science of Life?
* 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”
* Michel Morange, École Normale Supérieure, “The Resurrection of Life”
* Commentator: Daniel Cloud, Society of Fellows, Princeton University
[also see February 8]