Books by Alfred I. Tauber

The attack on psychoanalysis launched by Adorno, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein converged on Freud's construction of the modernist ego, thereby providing the competing notions of subjectivity and agency that characterize postmodernism.

This book is an intellectual history of the major theoretical problem in immunology and its resolution in the post-World War II period. In recent years immunology has been one of the most exciting-and successful-fields of biomedical research; this book provides essential background for understanding the conceptual conflicts occurring in the field.

Henry David Thoreau was caught at a critical turn in the history of science, between the ebb of Romanticism and the rising tide of positivism. This book shows how he responded to the challenges posed by the new ideal of objectivity not by rejecting the scientific world view, but by humanizing it for himself.

Freud began university intending to study both medicine and philosophy. But he was ambivalent about philosophy, regarding it as metaphysical, too limited to the conscious mind, and ignorant of empirical knowledge. Yet his private correspondence and his writings on culture and history reveal that he never forsook his original philosophical ambitions. Indeed, while Freud remained firmly committed to positivist ideals, his thought was permeated with other aspects of German philosophy. Placed in dialogue with his intellectual contemporaries, Freud appears as a reluctant philosopher who failed to recognize his own metaphysical commitments, thereby crippling the defense of his theory and misrepresenting his true achievement. Recasting Freud as an inspired humanist and reconceiving psychoanalysis as a form of moral inquiry, Alfred Tauber argues that Freudianism still offers a rich approach to self-inquiry, one that reaffirms the enduring task of philosophy and many of the abiding ethical values of Western civilization.