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User:Wantanabe/Wolf Schäfer

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Picture of Wolf Schäfer (2014)
Wolf Schäfer at a dinner for the Permanent Representative of Germany to the United Nations, 2014

Wolf Schäfer (born April 22, 1942, in Halle) is a historian and university professor with research and teaching activities in Germany and the United States.

Life

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Wolf Schäfer grew up in Frankfurt am Main after World War II. He was a freelance painter in the first half of the 1960s; in the second half he studied history, international politics and philosophy at the universities of Marburg, Bonn, King's College London and Munich, supported by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (M.A. 1970). His academic career began as an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Munich (1970-72) and then as a research associate in the Science Studies Group at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Living Conditions in the Scientific and Technical World (1973-81) under the direction of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. Schäfer received his doctorate from the University of Bremen in 1983 with a cumulative thesis on modern social history and the history of science. This work was published in 1985 under the title Die unvertraute Moderne (The unfamiliar Modern Age).

Wolf Schäfer's first American phase began after the shutdown of the Starnberg Institute with a series of fellowships: 1981 at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University, 1982 at the History of Science Department at Harvard University, 1983/84 at the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT, and 1984/85 at the Harvard Center for European Studies. In 1985, Schäfer became a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Studies at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences.

Schäfer's second American phase began in the late 1980s when he accepted a professorship at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where he taught history of science from 1989 to 2016 in the Department of History in the College of Arts and Sciences. To get closer to contemporary developments in science and technology, Schäfer became a faculty member in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2017. There, he was asked by the Dean to lead and rebuild the Department of Technology and Society (DTS), which he did under the premise engineering has become much too important to be left to the engineers. As DTS chair (2017-2022), he was also responsible for overseeing the Technology and Society department of the Stony Brook campus in South Korea. Schäfer is currently a John S. Toll Professor at Stony Brook University (SBU) and founding director of the Automotive Ethics Laboratory in his department.

In addition to his regular teaching and research activities, Schäfer has served in several administrative positions including Associate and Interim Dean for International Academic Programs (2011-15). He has raised research funding totaling over five million dollars, founded the Center for Global & Local History (home of the Long Island History Journal) and the Stony Brook Institute for Global Studies as well as the Globality Studies Journal.

Wolf Schäfer lives on the North Shore of Long Island. He is married to Anahi Walton, has two sons in Germany from his first marriage (with Ariane von Foelkersam) and a daughter from his second marriage (with Seyla Benhabib); he has six grandchildren.

Work

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Schäfer's research contributions have been published in both German and English in four subject areas. The first section comprises fundamental contributions on the social history of the 19th century, in particular on early German socialism. The second section brings together constructive contributions on the concept of global history as opposed to traditional world history. The third section contains historical and theoretical contributions to the study of science, in particular to the finalization theory of the natural sciences. The project in the fourth research area examines the moral scope for decision-making in automated vehicles.

Social history

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Schäfer's work on social history focuses on the first half of the 19th century and has two components: on the one hand, the analysis of early socialist theory-building processes and, on the other, the publication of relevant source texts. The overarching focus of this work is the displacement of the unscholarly thinking of the Magdeburg journeyman tailor Wilhelm Weitling (1808-71) by the scientific thinking of Karl Marx (1818-83). The difference between the two ways of thinking led to a break between Weitling and Marx in a meeting between Weitling, Marx and Engels in 1846. Schäfer has described unlearned thinking as collective theory formation from below, which is both interest-based and wild and constructive. Schäfer's materials on the Urwähler (Weitling's Berlin weekly), in particular the reproduction of the lost number 5 of the Urwähler from November 1848, provide a source contribution to Weitling research. The ideological tension between West Germany and East Germany was a serious context for this work.

Global history

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Wolf Schäfer has advocated understanding global history as the history of the present, or of the present age, and as a new form of historiography that distances itself from traditional world history. He has criticized the totalizing form of world historiography, which seeks to encompass the entire world, all of the human past and all of humanity, and has advocated a global history that must be 'large' enough to encompass the planetary processes of our time on the one hand, and small enough to meet the requirements of ordinary academic research (starting with doctoral theses) on the other. He argued in a Zeit article that the globalization of the world is the reality that began to epochalize in the 20th century. His thesis - that the actual 20th century began around 1950 - coincides with the periodization of the Anthropocene. Schäfer has coined the term Pangaea Two to describe the project of the new epoch. His approach was presented in the journal Erwägen Wissen Ethik and discussed controversially by 21 contributors. Schäfer's concept of global history is at odds with conventional forms of World History, including Big History. His contributions to the current emergence of a global technoscientific civilization in the singular go beyond the older idea of world civilizations in the plural and are the first attempts to outline the contours of global, technoscientific civilization.

Science Studies

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Schäfer's contributions to science studies are characterized by the learning processes in an interdisciplinary Max Planck working group, which made it possible to combine philosophy of science, sociology of science and history of science. However, the group's research program not only dealt with academic questions such as externalism and internalism, but also had a science policy thrust. The latter was based on the theory of the finalization of science, according to which external (economic, social, political) purposes can become the guiding principle for the development of scientific research areas. Following Kuhn and Lakatos, this theory was based on a three-phase model of the development of natural science, which linked its external purpose orientation to a universal and stable paradigm for a subject area. The finalization theory was attacked in 1976 as a political challenge to science and triggered a public debate. Schäfer has taken a stand in this dispute on several occasions. Schäfer and Wolfgang Krohn have demonstrated the contribution of finalization theory to a more comprehensive understanding of the history of science in a case study on Liebig's agricultural chemistry. In an article in Die Zeit in 1987, Schäfer explained that the problem of a sensible orientation of the dynamics of modern science and technology is being dealt with in a sustainable way by feminist and ecologically inspired social movements.

Automotive Ethics

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The team of engineering students and doctoral candidates in Schäfer's laboratory is researching the moral decision-making scope of artificial intelligence (AI) in self-driving vehicles. Its task is to simulate accidents involving highly automated vehicles for ethical edge cases, namely those in which an accident is unavoidable but the AI can choose between alternative damage events. This choice is determined by the moral theory fed to the AI. The project assumes that the development engineers do not have access to a universally valid ethics, but must choose to program in one of (at least) three philosophical systems, i.e. utilitarian, libertarian or deontological moral theory. The simulations in the ethics lab show that inconsistently programmed vehicles can arrive at dramatically different accident decisions in identical situations.

Miscellaneous

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On the occasion of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker's 100th birthday, a symposium of former employees of the Starnberg Max Planck Institute took place in Starnberg on June 30 and July 1, 2012. In this context, Schäfer gave a lecture on the reappraisal of the joint and von Weizsäcker's past. This resulted in publications on Weizsäcker's involvement in the construction of a German atomic bomb as well as on his connection with Heidegger and their mutual hope for an alternative Nazism.

Awards and prizes

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  • 1991-92 SEL endowed professorship at the Technical University of Darmstadt.
  • 2013 Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin with Anna Maria Kellen Fellowship.
  • 2020 Dean's Award, College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Stony Brook University.

Works/Writings

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  • Schäfer, Wolf (1985). Die unvertraute Moderne. Historische Umrisse einer anderen Natur- und Sozialgeschichte. Frankfurt: Fischer Wissenschaft.
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  • "Scientific publications by Wolf Schäfer via Google Scholar". Retrieved 2024-08-10.
  • "SBU, Institute for AI-Driven Discovery and Innovation, Faculty record Wolf Schäfer". Retrieved 2024-08-10.
  • "SBU, Department of Technology and Society, Faculty record Wolf Schäfer". Retrieved 2024-08-10.
  • "SBU, Automotive Ethics Laboratory". Retrieved 2024-08-16.
  • "Fahad Malik interviewing Professor Wolf Schafer on Technology and society (Part 1)". Retrieved 2024-08-16.
  • "Fahad Malik interviewing Professor Wolf Schafer on Technology and society (Part 2)". Retrieved 2024-08-16.

References

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[[Category:Men]] [[Category:1942 births]] [[Category:German people]] [[Category:American people]] [[Category:Stony Brook University faculty]] [[Category:Historians]]