Course documents.

Instructor

John D. Norton, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, 11th floor CL, 412 624 5896 jdnorton@pitt.edu

Place

1008C Cathedral of Learning

Time

Wednesday 2:00pm - 4:30pm

Your Part

Term paper

To be submitted by 5pm, Friday April 25, in email.

The paper may be on any subject of relevance to the seminar.

To assist you in commencing work, please submit a paper proposal by the seminar meeting, Wednesday April 2 in email ahead of the seminar time. The proposal need only be brief. It should contain a short paragraph describing the topic to be investigated and give a brief indication of the sources you intend to use. Do talk to me about possible topics in advance!

My policy is NOT to issue incomplete grades, excepting in extraordinary circumstances. I really do want your papers completed and submitted by the end of term. We do not want them to linger on like an overdue dental checkup, filling your lives with unnecessary worry and guilt.

The seminar will be structured around presentations by seminar members, including me. They are based on weekly readings drawn from the topics and reading list.

In presenting a reading, you should presume that the seminar has read the reading. You should spend a short amount of time reviewing the principal claims and arguments of the reading. This is not intended to replace the seminar's reading of the text, but merely to provide a basis of common agreement on its content and upon which subsequent discussion is based. Your principal burden is to provide a critical analysis and response to the reading. This analysis can take many directions. Is the project of the paper clear? Are the theses clear? Are the arguments cogent? How does the reading relate to other readings and issues in the seminar? Are there plausible counter-theses? What arguments support them?

You should plan to present for at most 40 minutes, preferably less. It will be followed by up to 20 minutes for discussion. If discussion starts prematurely, the discussion time may be interleaved with the full hour minutes allocated.

More on presentations. They should conclude with gems and coals .

Attendance and participation

I look forward to seeing and hearing you each week in the seminar.

The number of pages to be read each week has been kept short in order to make it feasible for everyone to do the reading. Please do the reading. Otherwise you will be unable to participate properly in discussion and become a burden on those who have done the readings.