Unifying Nature Past and Present
September 20-23, 2001
University of Florida
Gainesville, FL

    From September 20 to 23 scholars from the United States and Europe joined UF faculty in Gainesville to explore together the drive for unity lying behind past and present investigations of nature.  Participants also identified and assessed why this drive has sometimes been abandoned and what consequences, positive and negative, have resulted.
    The format of the conference, which took place over three days, included five plenary sessions that focused on specific contexts in which questions about the function of unity in nature can be raised (see below).   Three scholars considered each context, one from a primarily historical viewpoint, another with an eye to developments in the more recent past, and a commentator who provided an overview.  Participants looked beneath the surface of any social consensus about the role of science in the past or in the present to those deep-seated and lasting visions of nature and humankind that have endured over time in spite of changing articulations of the contents of science.
    From the beginning a primary concern of the group was to clarify what was entailed or intended in the word "unifying".   Reflected in the papers was a distinction between unity of knowledge and unity of experience.   The explorations of the ways in which human beings have constructed and continue to construct unity therefore involved, ironically, a host of diverse approaches that cross any boundaries between the conventional and the alternative.

Click for Informal photographs from conference

For information about the conference contact Frederick Gregory.

All sessions took place in the Department of History in Flint Hall on the UF campus.   Click for a schedule of the sessions.

Conference schedule

 Session 1. NATURE WRIT SMALL: THE ATOM

 Speakers

"Atoms in Chemistry: Divisible or Divisive?"        "Unification, Final Theory, ... -- and History"

                          

John Hedley Brooke                             Silvan Schweber

        Andreas Idreos Professor of Science & Religion           Professor of Physics and
                                  Oxford University                         Richard Korbet Professor of the
                                                                                                 History of Ideas
                                                                                              Brandeis University

NATURE WRIT SMALL.  If cosmology represents humankind's attempt to render intelligible the world of the very large, quantum theory goes to the other extreme.  Natural scientists have not yet been able to make considerations of the world of the very small compatible with those of the very large.  What need is met in the assumption that such a unification can be accomplished?  What assumptions lie at the basis of the age-old conviction that in the breaking up reality into corpuscles or atoms lies a pathway to understanding?  What kind of understanding is it that is sought in this way?  A historical consideration of the development of atomism in science helps make clear its successes and limitations.  Contemporary quantum theory has added new dimensions to this historic quest that expose the deep-seeded challenges embedded in the particularization of reality.  What opportunities exist here for new insights into the enduring but opposed human convictions that in taking reality apart we approach closer to an objective representation of nature but that we simultaneously truncate aspects of a unified view of humankind's relation to nature?

Commentator

Ernst Peter Fischer
Professor for Wissenschaftsgeschichte
at the Universität Konstanz

Session 2.  NATURE WRIT LARGE: THE COSMOS

Speakers

"One World or Many?  An Historical Perspective          "Our Universe - A Cosmos?"
    on the Question of Extraterrestrial Life"

                
Michael Crowe                               Willem B. Drees
       Rev. John J. Cavanaugh Professor         Nicolette Bruining Professor of Philosophy of
           in Humanities                                    Nature and Technology
       Notre Dame University                      Twente University,  Enschede
                                                                                        The Netherlands

      In the context of past and present pursuits of our understanding of cosmic origins a great deal of new knowledge has been acquired in the twentieth century. Much of this research has been pursued with an eye to contributing to a unified account of the entire span of  cosmic history.  How has our conception of the questions contained in the discipline of cosmology changed over time?  Were the fundamental queries motivating astronomers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries similar to those driving contemporary cosmologists?  Questions of cosmic origin have always lent themselves to mythological articulation in the past.  What contemporary myths accompany recent knowledge about the expansion of the universe, its origin in a Big Bang, and its ultimate state in the future?  How have the prospects of extra-terrestrial life affected past and present attempts to articulate a unified account of humankind's place in the cosmos?  What relative value have past and present societies assigned to the significance of our understanding of the physical origins and destiny of the universe?

Commentator

Helge Kragh
Professor of History of Science
University of Aarhus




Session 3.  NATURE IN DEVELOPMENT: EVOLUTION

 Speakers

                "Evolution in Nature and Culture:            "From Huxley to Wilson: Functions
                  Man's Responsibility for Nature"               of Unification in Modern Biology"

              

Dietrich von Engelhardt                      V. Betty Smocovitis
             Director, Insitut fur Medizin-und                 Associate Professor of History of Science Wissenschaftsgeschichte                                  University of Florida

                  Medizinische Universität zu Lübeck

    NATURE IN DEVELOPMENT.  Questions such as where have we come from are not limited to cosmology.  They have surfaced time and again with respect to the origin of life, particularly human life.  Once humankind began seeing its own past tied together with that of all life on the planet new mythologies of our beginnings had to be formulated.  What constraints, if any, did a predisposition to unified accounts impose on explanations of life's past?  What function did this predisposition fill?  Has this function changed over time, or has it been an intellectual need that has endured in recognizably similar manifestations?  Have there been attempts to suggest that evolutionary development might not be susceptible to unified accounts?

Commentator

Thomas Söderqvist
Professor and Chair, Department of History of Medicine
University of Copenhagen

Session 4.  NATURE IN REPAIR: MEDICINE

 Speakers

    "Before Medicine Killed (Holistic) Health"  "The Revival of Holistic Health: Risks and Benefits"

                                    

Frederick Gregory                                                    Allen H. Neims
          Professor of History of Science                     Professor of Pharmacology and Therapeutics
University of Florida                                         University of Florida

 NATURE IN REPAIR.  For the majority of people the need for a coherent and unified world view surfaces most frequently and most urgently in the context of health and disease.  Disease represents to many an identifiable fracturing of life's wholeness, supposedly life's "normal" flow.  Contemporary medicine promises so much that modern men and women have developed unrealistic expectations about its capacities.  Where has this propensity to promise so much and the expectation that humans have a right to expect life free of disease come from?  How have the various institutions of Western society promoted and hindered the possession of  reasonable attitudes about health?  In what ways do contemporary manifestations of the need for holistic health run parallel to or counter to current trends in modern medicine?

Commentator

Anne Harrington
Professor of History of Science
Harvard University

Closing Panel:  SUMMARY AND OVERVIEW
 
 

                      

    Klaus Vondung                   Stephen McKnight                       K. Ludwig Pfeiffer
Professor of Germanistik               Professor of History                        Professor of Anglistik
   Universität Siegen                  University of Florida                          Universität Siegen