Department of

0427 / CLASS 0330 Myth and Science
Goldberg, Benjamin
T 6:00-8:30 pm
How can we understand our world? In western culture, science dominates all our answers to this question. But there are other ways.  They can be found in the mythologies of ancient and modern peoples.  This course will compare the scientific and mythological ways of seeing the world and their more subtle connections. In particular, we will turn to the remarkable events in Ancient Greece of 800-400 B.C. and discover how the scientific approach actually grew slowly out of mythological thought itself.

0437 Darwinism and Its Critics
Lennox, James
M W 10:00-10:50 am
Charles Darwin’s ideas not only revolutionized biology - they also have revolutionary implications for how we see ourselves and our place in nature.  We will study the origins and development of Darwin’s ideas, and the reactions of the scientific, religious and philosophic community to them from Darwin’s time to our own.  The course revolves around two central questions: (1) What is the scientific status of Darwinism? (2) What are the implications of Darwinism for our beliefs about human nature?  We will spend the last few weeks of the term looking in detail at a variety of contemporary critics of Darwinism.

0515 / HIST 0089 Magic, Medicine and Science
Gyenis, Balazs
M 12:00-2:25 am           
This course is a partial survey of some important strands in the Western intellectual history. We will start with ancient Greek speculations in cosmology, philosophy, and medicine. Then we will look at some important subsequent developments in these areas and how they were influenced by the Greek tradition. These include, among other topics, the magical tradition that flourished during the Renaissance period. The latter half of the course will focus on the profound intellectual transformations in the 17th century which constitute what we often call The Scientific Revolution. The great scientific
achievements of figures such as Descartes, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton will be discussed in detail. Overall, this course is meant to provide a broad picture of some of the most important elements in the Western intellectual tradition and their interactions in history.

0605 The Nature of Emotions
Machery, Edouard
M W 12:00-12:50 pm
This course will examine selected historically important theories and portrayals of the human emotions or passions. The course will examine different accounts of love, hate, desire, anger, jealousy, pride, grief, etc., ie., the affective dimension of human existence. It will look at how these dimensions of experience relate to ideas of reason, control, the will, decorum, and morality, and our knowledge of the "sciences" of human beings. A number of questions will guide the readings and discussions. Which emotions or passions are primitive? In what are the emotions grounded: the body, the mind, the spirit? Can these even be usefully distinguished? What is the structure of human emotions and how do they function? What are the relations among emotions, personality types and behavior? Can one learn to recognize emotions, control emotions, change the way emotions affect behavior? How can one test or validate theories about emotions?

0611 Principles of Scientific Reasoning
Livengood, Jonathan
M 6:00-8:30 pm
The course will provide students with elementary logic skills and an understanding of scientific arguments.  Ours is an increasingly scientific and technical society.  In both our personal life decisions and in our work we are daily confronted by scientific results which influence what we do and how we do it.  Basic skills in analyzing the structure of arguments in terms of truth and evidence are required to make this type of information accessible and useful.  We hear, for example, that drinking alcoholic beverages reduces the chances of heart disease.  We might well ask what sorts of tests were done to reach this conclusion and do the tests really justify the claim?  We read that certain geographical configurations in South America "prove" that this planet was visited by aliens from outer space.  Does this argument differ from other, accepted scientific arguments?  This course is designed to aid the student in making sense of a variety of elementary logic skills in conjunction with the application of those skills to actual cases.

0613 Morality and Medicine
Mitchell, Sandra
M W 1:00-1:50 pm
Thomsen, Samuel (Day program)
Th 6:00-8:30 pm
Ethical dilemmas in the practice of health care continue to proliferate and receive increasing attention from members of the health care profession, ethicists, policy makers, and the general public as health care consumers.  In this course we will examine a number of ethical issues that arise in the context of contemporary medical practice and research by analyzing articles and decision scenarios. Topics to be covered typically include the physician-patient relationship; informed consent; medical experimentation; termination of treatment; genetics; reproductive technologies; euthanasia; resource allocation; and health care reform. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to identify and analyze different philosophical approaches to selected issues in medical ethics; have gained insight into how to read and critically interpret philosophical arguments; and have developed skills that will enable them to think clearly about ethical questions as future or current health care providers, policy makers, and consumers.
This course is part of a core sequence leading to certification in the Conceptual Foundations of Medicine Certificate Program, and is a companion course to HPS 0612 (Mind and Medicine) but may be taken independently.  The course is of particular interest to pre-medical and pre-health care students.

1528 European Intellectual History 1750-1930-Honors College
Hammond, Leslie
Th 2:4.30 pm
In this course, we will explore primary source documents of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The texts under consideration will include works by Rousseau, Bentham, Adam Smith, Mary and Percy Shelley, Wordsworth, Baudelaire and others. Through our study of these pieces, the class will attempt to answer the questions, "What is Enlightenment?" and "What is Romanticism?" We will explore the dialogs and relationships between the works in these two categories, and we will examine the similarities and differences between them as well. This course will be conducted as a seminar. It will be guided by students' questions and interests and by student-driven discussion. In addition to class participation, grades will be based upon two papers and two examinations.

1653 / PHIL 1610 Introduction to Philosophy of Science
Earman, John
M W 11:00-11.50 am
This course explores the principal ways in which scientific knowledge is attained in the natural sciences and in the behavioral/social sciences, and it examines fundamental philosophical questions concerning the reliability and limits of scientific understanding. The major topics of discussion include: Explanation, confirmation, realism and the nature of theories, the growth of scientific knowledge, space and time, and causality and determinism.

1682 Freedom and Determination
Boxer, Karin
T Th 2:30-3.45 pm
The free will debate is as old as philosophy itself; despite this, it is no closer to resolution today than it was 2500 years ago. This course will examine some of the central questions in that debate: Is free will compatible with determinism? Does it require the ability to have done otherwise than what we actually did? How are we to understand this ability? Must we be the ultimate sources of our own actions? Is this notion even coherent? If not, where does this leave us? Related questions concerning the topic of moral responsibility will also be explored.

1690 / PHIL 1690 Topics in Philosophy of Science: Versions of atomism in the history of philosophy
Chalmers, Alan
T Th 9:30-10:45 am
There are various versions of atomism in the history of philosophy with varying contents and modes of defense. It is the aim of this course to illuminate various issues in the philosophy of science by taking a critical look at the various versions of atomism and their relation to science.
Leucippus and Democritus first articulated a defense of atomism in Ancient Greece. Aristotle opposed it. It is typically thought that Aristotle was largely mistaken. But the inability of Democritean atomism to guide experiment and the way in which a version of atomism to be found in Aristotle was productively taken up by chemists may signal a need to revise the common story. A version of Democritean atomism was revived and defended by mechanical philosophers in the seventeenth century. It is typically thought that this move, and the distinctions between primary and secondary qualities and real and nominal essences that it led to, were part and parcel of the advances of the scientific revolution. However, insofar as atomism did productively guide experimental science, there are grounds for arguing that the tradition stemming from Aristotle had more to offer experimentalists than the atomism of the mechanical philosophers. Once again, a critical look at and re-evaluation of the standard view promises to be instructive. Atoms begin to find a secure place in science in the nineteenth century, and the question arises of the extent to which the scientific successes here owed a debt to philosophical atomism. There are reasons to doubt it. There are also reasons to qualify, if not doubt, the popular view that scientific proof of the existence of atoms by the beginning of the twentieth century marked a victory for realism over positivism.
The foregoing remarks are designed to give a taste of the kinds of issues to be discussed and to suggest there are philosophical lessons to be learnt from a close look at the history of atomism.

top