Designed for beginning graduate students, but repeatable for credit, this course addresses some of the practical aspects of professional life in History and Philosophy of Science and related fields. Topics include research tools, grant proposals, presentation skills, research ethics, job applications, teaching, and challenges facing underrepresented groups in the academy.
Learn more about this courseThe course covers the debates about the view that science is (or ought to be) value-free. The course combines historical and systematic perspectives. Topics include: 19th-century ideas about 'pure science' and scientific freedom, ideals of 'value-free science' and current debates about the roles values play (or should play) in science.
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 courseCabinets of curiosities, collections, and museums reflected and at the same time contributed to shaping through their material holdings the world of learning and the organization of knowledge of their time. They included naturalia and artificialia, marvels and rarities from both the old and the new worlds. The literature on early modern collections and museums is highly interdisciplinary and includes, but is not limited to, antiquarianism, the history of art, of several sciences (notably medicine and natural history), and, more broadly, of collecting and displaying. This class seeks to familiarize students from different backgrounds and with different interests with the relevant literature from the Renaissance to Hans Sloane, whose collections upon his death (1753) became the basis of the British Museum, and later of the British Library and Natural History Museum.
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The College of Arts