Introduction to the Philosophy of Science

Sylabus

Schedule:  

Unit 1: Early Analytic Philosophy of Science and its Challenges  

Week 1: Logical Positivism

Rudolph Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics” & “Logical Foundations of the Unity of Science”

[Optional: Kent Staley, “Logical Empiricism”

Grover Maxwell, “The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities”]  

Week 2: Falsification and Demarcation

Karl Popper, excerpts from, "Science: Conjectures and refutations"

[Optional: Kent Staley, “Falsificationism: science without induction?”]  

Week 3: Underdetermination

Pierre Duhem, excerpts from The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory

[Optional: Kent Staley, “Underdetermination”]  

Week 4: Incommensurability, Historiography, and Anti-Realism

Thomas Kuhn, excerpts from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

[Optional: Laura Schroeter, “The Limits of Conceptual Analysis”

Kent Staley, “Kuhn: scientific revolutions as paradigm changes”]  

Unit 2: Background in Ancient to Early Modern Science  

Week 5: Aristotelian Science and its Legacy

Aristotle, excerpts from the Physics, Metaphysics, and Posterior Analytics

Aquinas, “Is Theology a Science?” (ST I.1)

[Optional: James Lennox, “Aristotle’s Biology” (SEP)

Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), “A Verification of the True Account of the Soul” (The Soul, V.7)]  

Weeks 6 & 7: Reason and Experiment in Early Modern Science

James Robert Brown, “Illustrations from the laboratory of the mind” (On Galileo and Newton)

[Optional: Alexandre Koyré, “Galileo’s Treatise ‘De Motu Gravium’”]  

Émilie Du Châtelet, excerpts from the Foundations of Physics

[Optional: Katherine Brading & Marius Stan, excerpts from Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason

David Hume, excerpts from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding]  

Unit 3: Scientific Method: Science and Society  

Week 8: Feminist and Social Epistemology

Sandra Harding, “Borderland Epistemologies”

Helen Longino, excerpts from Science as Social Knowledge

[Optional: Kent Staley, “Values in Science”]  

Week 9: Explanation in the Social Sciences

J.W.N. Watkins, “Historical explanation in the social sciences”

Steven Lukes, “Methodological individualism reconsidered”

[Optional: Émile Durkheim, excerpts from On Suicide

Joseph Heath, “Methodological Individualism” (SEP)”]  

Unit 4: Scientific Method: Value-Free Tools?  

Week 10: Models, Abduction, and Anti-Realism

Bas van Fraassen, excerpts from The Scientific Image

Gilbert Harman, “The Inference to the Best Explanation”

[Optional: Ronald Giere, “Models and Theories” from Explaining Science: A Cognitive Approach]  

Weeks 11 & 12: Experiment and Measurement

Allan Franklin, “How to avoid the experimenters' regress”

[Optional: Harry Collins, “Detecting Gravitational Radiation: The Experimenter’s Regress”]  

Hasok Chang, excerpts from Inventing Temperature

[Optional: Eran Tal, “Measurement in Science” (SEP)]  

Anotace

Introduction to the Philosophy of Science: Science, History, and Society

General Description:

SUMMER TERM 2024

BA + Erasmus Module

Mondays, 15:50-17:20, P217

Instructor & contact: Dr. André Martin, [e-mail]

This course will serve as an introduction to the philosophy of science with a focus on its historical and social developments, in seeming contrast with its more ideal objective aims. We will pursue such questions as: What makes scientific knowledge the apparent gold standard of knowledge? What are the methods of science, are they distinct, and are they distinctly modern? How can science both change over time and claim to provide privileged knowledge (or any at all) of a mind-independent world? The first two units of this course will be more explicitly historical: Unit 1 will start with a look at the direct roots of contemporary philosophy of science in early 20th century analytic empiricism, along with its challenges, especially from the deeply historical approach of Thomas Kuhn; Unit 2 will take a step back and consider some of the prior approaches of ancient to early modern science. In the second two units of this course, we will examine the varied methods of more contemporary science, in light of past and persisting challenges: e.g., the use of ideal models, experimental tools, abductive reasoning, and, most notably, social, value-laden, systems of knowledge generation. The historical approach to the philosophy of science will nonetheless return at the end of this course, most explicitly, when we examine the surprisingly deep challenges to be found in how we came to measure temperature with modern thermometers, via Hasok Chang’s Inventing Temperature.