Philosophy of Science

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Much has changed in the discipline of philosophy of science since its official beginning with Moritz Schlick's appointment as professor of the philosophy of the inductive sciences at the University of Vienna in 1922. Scientific explanation remains central to the discipline, but it is clear that there is much more going on in explanation than what goes on in explanations in physics. Indeed most of the central issues and debates in the philosophy of science have been radically reshaped since the fading away of logical empiricism in the late 1970s. This is an overview of the central themes and issues of contemporary philosophy of science and we will attempt to understand, among other things, whether there even is such a thing as science, that discipline to which all the various sciences are supposed to belong, and we will attempt to understand whether there can be any univocal answer to traditional questions in the philosophy of science when those questions are asked against a background conception of science that is explicitly broadened to include such diverse practices as biology, psychology, economics, physics, chemistry, etc. The main focus of the course will be attempting to understand how the central themes of philosophy of science (realism/anti-realism, explanation, prediction, laws, etc) play out in a variety of contemporary sciences, and to get a sense for whether these issues may be science specific.