This is an introductory course designed for all students with an interest in the history of the sciences and their cultural contexts. We will cover select topics from Greek to early modern science, emphasizing both primary sources and contemporary historiographical debates.
Learn more about this courseThe course is a survey of issues in the philosophy of science and issues in the philosophy of special sciences (mathematical, physical, biological, psychological, social and technological). The courses will cover received views that informed central issues in the second half of the 20th-century, subsequent developments and new issues. General topics include observation, experimentation, modeling, simulations, explanation, understanding, testing, realism, causation, values, unity and pluralism, and the relation of philosophy of science to the sciences, history and science studies.
Learn more about this courseThis version of X632 is about scientific understandings of human differences and processes of differentiation, especially differences between the sexes and the races, from the late eighteenth century to the present. A central question in many of these debates was how (or whether) unity could be found amid the diversity: Was there a common origin in heredity, embryology, or evolution, from which all humans diverged to varying degrees? And if so, what caused the divergence—environment, culture, nutrition, disease, natural selection? Or contrarily, were the sexes and races fixed and incommensurable categories?
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The College of Arts