A Conference jointly sponsored with the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Organized by Lois Oppenheim and Akeel Bilgrami, along with Center Co-Directors Francis Levy and Edward Nersessian.

The event will be held at 501 Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia Univeristy. (Use the main entrance on Broadway and go up the "Great Steps." Walk past the Low Library and proceed past the Avery Building. To the right of Avery is Schermerhorn.)

Ever since Max Weber lamented the rationalization of the world, the intellectualization that social and personal disenchantment rendered characteristic of modernity, the meaning of value has been thrown into question. How are we to understand the place of value in a world of nature when that world is viewed as containing nothing that is not countenanced by natural science? Can we account for the nature of value--and its implications for normative thinking and behavior--in terms that are exhausted by the methods and concepts of the sciences? If so, how might we elaborate those methods and those concepts? If not, what are the alternative forms of accounting for value? These and related questions will be raised and discussed by some of the most distinguished philosophers, scientists, and historians of science in the world.

Lorraine Daston is Director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. Her writing focuses on the history of probability and scientific objectivity. She is the author of Things that Talk: Object Lessons and Science, Biographies of Scientific Objects, and Classical Probability in the Enlightenment, which was awarded the Pfizer Prize. She has co-authored numerous books, including Wonders and the Order of Nature and Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism.

Gerald Edelman is the founder and Director of The Neurosciences Institute, a non-profit research center in San Diego that studies the biological basis of higher brain functions, and separately is Chairman of the Department of Neurobiology at The Scripps Research Institute. He is the recipient of the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work on the immune system. His books include Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge, Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness, and Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind.