The objectives of this course are to provide masters level students in philosophy with the background required for independent research in the philosophy of science and to provide graduate students in the sciences with more than the basic knowledge required to understand the philosophical presuppositions of their research. Students who have never taken a philosophy course before will find this course challenging, to say the least.
Good students rise to a challenge.
The first two thirds of the course will be spent on general issues in the philosophy of science, including the cognitive significance of theories, scientific method and theory change, realism and antirealism, the structure of explanation, and the reduction of special sciences to basic sciences. The last portion of the course will be spent on the topic of teleological explanation in biology. All students will be required to give oral presentations of assigned readings. For the purposes of these presentations, each student will be arbitrarily assigned to one of 3 teams. Presentations of each module will be collaboratively organized within the corresponding teams.