Philosophy of Science

The course starts from the assumption that there are key ingredients that all sciences share; the goal is to explore what these are. In week 1, students are offered a succinct historical overview of a few paradigm-changing discoveries in the natural science to get a hunch of “how scientists do it”. Then they move on to more typical philosophical questions: What is science? What is pseudoscience? What are the main ingredients of scientific discovery? Can we characterize “strokes of genius” in the sciences – is there a general theory for paradigm-changing creativity? What are some of the main social determinants of science? Is science a social construct? What degrees of “certainty” (or “truth”) do we have in science?

Students also peek at the following question: Can philosophy and science interact fruitfully? (It is suggested that, actually, science and philosophy always go hand in hand, and naturally inform each other in a bi-directional way.) In order to at least partially answer the above questions, teh course focuses on important contemporary authors and schools of thought in philosophy of science, notably: Carl Hempel, Karl Raimund Popper, the Vienna Circle and the logical empiricists, Thomas Kuhn, and very recent authors as Willard v. O. Quine and Bas van Fraassen. Students are given the opportunity to develop favorite ideas and theories by presenting texts chosen from anthologies.