Listing of Sessions and Abstracts of Papers - History of Science ...

Selya, Rena
E-mail Address: selya@fas.harvard.edu
The Microbiologist and His Times: Salvador Luria and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement
Throughout his scientific career in the United States, geneticist Salvador Luria took an active interest
in the social and political issues that defined American public life in the Cold War era. The height of his
involvement came during the Vietnam War years, when he took public stances both within the scientific
community and within the Boston intellectual community against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. This
paper will examine the various strategies Luria used as a scientific authority trying to effect scientific
and political change during the 1960s. I will present Luria’s work as President of the American Society
for Microbiology to end that organization’s role in assisting the U. S. Army in developing biological
weapons. His widely publicized presidential address announcing the end of that relationship, he Microbiologist
and His Times,e responsibility that all scientists have to ensure that their work is not used for
harmful means. This paper will also describe Luria’s participation in the Boston Area Faculty Group on
Public Issues (BAFGOPI), an ad hoc committee of academics who mobilized their colleagues around
the country to protest the Vietnam War and other US policies in the popular press. Luria’s stature within
the scientific community gave him a measure of cultural capital that he used as part of the protest movement
against the war. This case of the biologist as public citizen provides an opportunity to consider not
only the role biology played in Cold War military strategies, but also kind of authority biologists commanded
in the public sphere.
Sepkoski, David
E-mail Address: sepk0003@tc.umn.edu
Mathematization and the ‘Language of Nature’ in the 17th Century
Although an older historiography of ‘mathematization’ in the scientific revolution associated with the
work of Alexandre Koyré, E.J. Dijksterhuis and others presents the development of mathematics from
Galileo to Newton as a philosophically continuous process, more recent studies have suggested that
mathematical beliefs actually varied more widely. Contemporary debates over the foundations of
mathematics demonstrate that mathematization meant different things to different practitioners, and the
historiographical notion that mathematics was universally recognized as a single, fundamental ‘language
of nature’ has become problematic. While Kepler, Galileo and Descartes may have had an almost
Platonic faith in the correspondence between linguistic and mathematical representations and physical
reality, an alternative tradition -- characterized by the ‘nominalist’ philosophies of Pierre Gassendi and
Thomas Hobbes -- held that such representations were justified only by human convention. This tradition
influenced the mathematical beliefs of practitioners such as John Wallis, Isaac Barrow, and Isaac
Newton, and their work reveals how different approaches to the philosophy of language and representation
produced different strategies for ‘reading’ the mathematical text of nature. My paper will examine
the mathematical philosophies of Gassendi, Barrow and Newton, arguing that their methods and assumptions
-- about the reality of mathematical objects and the signification of geometrical and algebraic
symbols, for example -- reflect concerns that were central to the empiricist philosophy of representation.
Taken together, this group articulated a coherent critique of Cartesian mathematization that played a
vital role in the development of 17th century mathematical epistemology, and influenced debates about
the application of mathematics to nature well into the next century.
Servos, John
E-mail Address: jwservos@amherst.edu
What a Liberal Arts College is Looking for in an HSTM Faculty Member