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)]