Introduction to Philosophy of Science

Course goals

After completing this course, the student is able to:
- Use philosophical concepts to reflect on the natural sciences.
- Comment on the relationship between philosophy and the natural sciences.
- Put philosophical ideas about science in historical context

 

Content

By exploring the history of the philosophy of science, this course encourages students to think about what it means to think critically in the 21st century. Since the seventeenth century, if not earlier, much of philosophy has been about criticism. The philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment encouraged people to think for themselves and tried to articulate the power and limits of human reason. They looked for science as a model of critical inquiry, and at the same time they critically examined it. Is there a scientific method that somehow guarantees the output of valuable knowledge? Are there limits to scientific inquiry? Who decides who is right when scientists fundamentally disagree among each other? Assuming science has authority, how can one identify practices that only pretend to be scientific? And what if an element of dogmatism is vital to science?