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::: center home >> news >> 2005-06 annual review |
| 2005-06 annual review Director's Annual Review
PEOPLE EVENTS CHANGES
This past year has been one of change at the Center. The first change that you will notice is in this Review. The tradition has been that the Center produces and mails out a printed Bulletin once each year at the end of summer. That bulletin summarized the year's events, reporting on conferences and talks held during the year and on the Fellows who visited that year. Over the years we have been increasing the content in our website, so that now most of the information traditionally published in the Bulletin is available on the website. So with this Review, we will start a new tradition. At the end of the academic year, each summer, the Director will report on those aspects of the events of the past year that are not easily recovered from reading the announcements on the website. We will also begin regular email bulletins, which will be short emails linking you to relevant information on the website. Since the urgency of the name "Bulletin" is more appropriate to them, we will call this annual communication a "Review," in keeping with its more leisurely reflection on the year past. We hope to continue to use this review and our website as a means for the Center community to remain in touch. As usual, we will solicit news from everyone each year and report special achievements here. In the case of past Visiting Fellows, however, we plan a slightly more elaborate system. For several years, we have been setting up a page on our website for each new Visiting Fellow when they come to Pittsburgh. As a result we already have pages set up for many former Visiting Fellows and will be pleased to set up a new page for any past Visiting Fellow who sends us material suitable for posting on it. Whether it is to create a new page or add new material to an existing page, we invite past Visiting Fellows to send us updates whenever they feel so moved. There is no need to wait for our annual reminder. Resident Fellows, Associates, and Visiting Scholars are listed on our website and we'd be happy to correct and update these mentions, including linking to their homepages. Let us know. The greatest change of the past year was the retirement of Jim Lennox as Center director at the end of August 2005. While we took the opportunity to thank and celebrate Jim's years of service at an event in September of 2005 (see below), Jim's contributions to the Center have been so extraordinary that it is only fitting to pause once again to recall them. Jim served as director from 1997 to 2005. Our brief Center history reports the signal achievements of Jim's tenure. Most significantly, Jim managed to secure a stable financial basis to sustain Center operations at their present levels. The Center he found in 1997 was thriving with activity, but the funding needed to maintain that activity was never really assured beyond a year or so. So Jim's enduring legacy for the Center was that he took an uncertain future and replaced it with an assured future. There is much more to record. Under Jim's careful guidance, the Center's programs flourished. He initiated public outreach programs and further expanded our international agreements. All this has been dutifully recorded in our history. What I want to pay tribute to are Jim's efforts that are not recorded. Jim was Director of the Center for eight years. Only someone who has carried significant administrative obligations, as many readers of this review have, can fully appreciate what that means. For eight years Jim needed to make every distress suffered by the Center his own personal distress. Only by doing that could he be assured that the Center would pass them safely. And the principal reward for these worries is simply knowing that through his constant efforts, the Center flourishes. During Jim's tenure as Director, 77 Visiting Fellows and Visiting Scholars came and resided in the Center. As everyone who visited in this time knows, Jim made a personal connection with each one. He supported them when things did not go well; he helped solve their problems as if they were his own; and he shared in their triumphs. That became his daily routine. In September, on the occasion of John Beatty's visit to the University of Pittsburgh, we assembled to thank Jim for his years of service. At the "Jimfest," John spoke on Darwin, teleology and orchids in Jim's honor, since these are topics close to Jim's research heart. We assembled afterwards, with Pat Lennox and some of Jim's personal friends in attendance, to hear Adolf Gruenbaum's speech of thanks on behalf of us all. In reviewing in detail Jim's contributions to the Center, he was able to put in words our communal sense of gratitude for Jim's efforts. It was a happy and memorable event that gave each of us a chance to convey our thanks to Jim. With the end of Jim's tenure as Director, the Center faced an acute problem. Its new Director--me!--had just completed a five year term as Chair of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and badly needed a leave to recover his nerve. With great generosity, John Earman agreed to step in as Acting Director for a term. We should recall here that, through his eminence in philosophy of science, John is much called upon by many throughout our field. He carries numerous administrative burdens, including his recent Presidency of the Philosophy of Science Association. So for a term, the storms of the Center became his storms and the ship was assured of an experienced and steady hand on the tiller. John--on behalf of us all, many thanks! One of the great, formative influences on the Center is Jerry Massey, who served as Director of the Center from 1988 to 1997. Among the many recognitions of his valuable service was the awarding to him in 1997 by the President of Germany, Dr. Roman Herzog, of the Bundesverdienstkreuz 1ste Klasse (Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his contributions to German-American academic and philosophical cooperation. Jerry continued to provide his expertise to the Center, serving until late August 2006 as a Center Officer. Jerry has now relinquished the obligations of this position, but plans to participate fully in Center life as a Resident Fellow. At the end of August 2006, the Center is losing two of its experienced officers, Laura Ruetsche and Anil Gupta. Both Laura and Anil served as Associate Director from September 2005 through August 2006. While Associate Directors are not so visible, they are an essential part of the successful operation of the Center. They contribute their time, insight and experience in many ways, from serving on committees and evaluating applications from Visiting Fellows to helping organize talks and conferences. In addition to these many and varied services, the Center is especially grateful to Laura for her chairmanship of the Membership Committee, and to Anil for his expert chairing of the committee that organizes the Annual Lecture Series. We wish them well and, now that their time has been freed up, they will have plenty of opportunity to come down to Center talks and events! Brian Hepburn With the new year we welcome Ken as an Associate Director. Ken has been part of the Pittsburgh community for a long time. He was one of its first professors when the Department of History and Philosophy of Science was founded in the Jurassic era. This long association was broken only by a brief detour of a dozen or so years at George Washington University, which included a stay in the Center as a Visiting Fellow. Ken is eminent and his research interests varied; his recent work has been on ethical and philosophical issues in human behavioral and psychiatric genetics. Tom Ricketts Brian Hepburn is being replaced by Jim Tabery as the guy who works the miracles behind the curtains. He maintains a tradition, in that he is also an HPS graduate student. Jim is in the concluding stages of a PhD dissertation on "Genotype-Environment Interaction and the Development of Behavioral Genetics." The Center community has enjoyed many successes over the past year. It is a Books: Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies, has just been published by Southern Illinois Press. Next spring, the University of Chicago Press will publish The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour, co-authored with Joseph E. Harmon of Argonne National Laboratories. Henry has accepted a new position at Claremont Graduate University as Andrew W. Mellon All Claremont Chair of Humanites and Director of Cultural Studies. His position involves teaching in Cultural Studies at CGU but also in Science Studies at Harvey Mudd. Henry--congratulations from us all! We'll miss you here! New books: Symmetry and Complexity. The Spirit and Beauty of Nonlinear Science. World Scientific Singapore 2005; Chinese Translation: Beijing 2006 Special lectures or presentations: Invited lecture at the Frankfurt Institute of Advanced Studies (FIAS) of the Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University Frakfurt (Jan. 2006) on ÒSymmetry and Complexity in Dynamical SystemsÓ; Invited opening lecture at the Summer School on Complexity of the Chinese Academy of Science (Beijing-University August 2006): ÒChallenges of Complexity in the 21st CenturyÓ; Invited opening lecture of the International Conference ÒModels of Brain and Mind: Physical, Computational and Psychological ApproachesÓ at the Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics, University of Calcutta/India (Nov. 2006); Grants, fellow ship, awards: Guest-professor at the Beijing-University, Beijing/China (August 2006) Last year (2005) was the centenary of Einstein's annus mirabilis of 1905. As an Einstein guy I did the rounds of the many Einstein celebrations, speaking in events in Pittsburgh, Washington, London, Berlin, Tenerife, Jerusalem, Pasadena, Florence, Turin and Bern. For more see my website. Forthcoming publication: (Edited jointly with Bart Van Kerkhove) Perspectives on Mathematical Practices. Bringing together Philosophy of Mathematics, Sociology of Mathematics, and Mathematics Education (Dordrecht: Springer/Kluwer Academic, 2006). Anyone who visits the Center cannot help but develop a friendship with Karen, Joyce and Carol. For, with efficiency and good cheer, they attend to each Visiting Fellow's needs, from big visa and payroll issues to the vexing computer woe to picking up that annoying typo in the abstract of the talk. They are thriving and remember each of you fondly. Karen (and Gabe, whom some of you met as a pup) have added a new dog, named Gretel, to their family. Joyce has become a database wizard! ...and admits that she really likes data! Carol nearly died over the summer perfecting the website?! ..now hates the letters h, t, m , l in any combination?! The past year has been as busy as ever. We had a full program of lunchtime talks and our Annual Lecture Series continues in all strength as one of the oldest continuously operating series in philosophy of science. We hosted two major workshops. Robert and Sarah Boote Conference in Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in Physics
The workshop was held April 22-23, 2006. It assembled a small group of scholars to discuss and debate what is emerging as a major locus of discussion in philosophy of physics. The tired stereotype is that physicists tend to be reductionists, whereas biologists tend to favor some emergentist view. A new group in philosophy of physics is drawing on the last few decades of work in statistical physics and arguing that the reductionist position is dead even in physics. Of course nothing is ever that simple and some of us are not convinced. To get a sense of the workshop and its discussion, see the synopsis contributed by participants, posted on philsci-archive along with several of its papers. The conference was supported by Bob and Sarah Boote. Bob took a law degree from Pitt in 1970. During his time at Pitt, he developed an interest in philosophy of science through Center events. That interest persists today and Bob has become a most welcome visitor at Center events during his trips through Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh-Princeton Descartes Day II One sometimes gets a sense that academic events are over-programmed, over-scheduled and over-ritualized. If we could just all be thrown together to talk and think, wouldn't it be fascinating to see what might come out? That was the driving sprit behind the second of the Descartes Days, this one held at the Center. The program captures its mood: "Descartes Day is an informal gathering of scholars and graduate students in order to discuss Cartesian texts in an unhurried setting. No papers are given. The first Descartes Day was held in Princeton in May 2004. It came about because of long discussions between Dan Garber, Peter Machamer, Ted McGuire, and Roger Ariew. There never seemed to be enough time to finish the discussions. So we said, let's pick a day and invite some convivial people and discuss further. This is the second meeting. There may be more and maybe other texts than Descartes will be discussed." Visiting Fellows Discussion Group This group was an innovation of the Spring Term. The idea was that each week the Visiting Fellows and Director would meet to discuss a short text contributed by one of the Visiting Fellows. That way we got to know each other's work and each other academically. The rules were simple. The text had to be short -- say a dozen pages--so it really would be read. No presentations were allowed; it was presumed that everyone had read the text and discussion began immediately. And we would repair to dinner afterwards to drown our sorrows in the molecule of choice: ethanol, disacharides, polysaccharides or glycerides or combinations thereof. And we did just that all the way through the term. The biggest change you will notice is our new website. It has taken six months of sustained work to complete it. Those efforts began in February in a staff meeting in which we compared websites we'd collected, picking out what we liked and didn't like. That meeting gave the commission to Carol, our webmaster, and , a webdesigner who also conveniently happens to be an HPS graduate student. They labored and labored, in continuing consultation with the rest of the staff, to arrive at the present result. You will surely all agree that the site is a great success. It is clean and elegant and an easy place to find information. Our plan is to use the website more extensively to announce upcoming events and to maintain contact with the Center community. Over the next few months we are interested in finding out from you whether the new website's calendar and schedule of events can replace the printed calendar we now circulate locally. Through the website, we will also be expanding our efforts to publicize Center events. To this end, we have initiated roughly monthly email bulletins that will be sent to a wider audience. They will be short, designed essentially only to alert the recipient that something interesting is afoot at the Center and that details are a click away on the new website. You may also like to look at another new element of our website. It is essential on a website like the Center's to record the basic facts of who will give which talk when; to post the abstracts; to give links to papers if they are available; and so on. That record, no matter how thorough, inevitably misses out on the human side of the Center. It is at its heart a group of people who are sometimes passionate, sometimes energetic and sometimes not; and sometimes eloquent, sometimes funny and sometimes not. So you will now find a photo album and my rather personal effort to tell the story of this human side is in the new "Donuts" page. The Center is in its fifrth decade and the Visiting Fellows program is approaching its third. So keeping track of who is who; and who visited when; and as what; and what their home institution is now; and so on, has grown beyond what we can easily do by consulting files and lists. So the other thing that has consumed our attentions through this past summer is the developing of a relational SQL database. This project was very much Brian's creation and, as he left the office for the last time in his employ here, the database was up and running and in daily use by everyone. It was a moment that seemed distant and unreachable for very long and so all the more satisfying when it came. It now forms the basis for our communication with you. Joyce, whose finger hits the "send" button on all our emails to you, is now adept at generating suitable lists of email addresses from the database and attaching an email message to them. Both Joyce and Carol have honed their database skills by taking a refresher course. In case you hadn't noticed, we are all feeling a little smug here that we really know just what is meant by "relational SQL database." I've even composed the odd query myself. ----- With end of August, I will have been Director of the Center for eight months and am still flattered and honored that the Center thought I could be trusted to do the job. It has been a lot of work--frankly, more than I expected. But it has also been a lot of fun--and again more than I expected. I took special pleasure in getting to know the Visiting Fellows, who probably found me too talkative when they had better things to do. I now look forward to getting to know the new Fellows, who at the time of this writing are only weeks away. Finally, over the last eight months, I have asked a lot of everyone in the Center. The development of the new website and database are just the most visible aspects. Karen, Joyce, Carol and Brian have tolerated my persistent demands with more energy and good humor than I have the right to ask. John D. Norton |
