Revolutions in Science: Plato to NATO
An introduction to the formative steps in the scientific tradition as well as philosophical investigations of the nature of science.
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Science and Culture
An introduction to the study of science as a human activity that both contributes to cultural change and responds to it. A thematic, rather than a chronological survey, the course presents and compares recent and historical issues and events, and brings out some of the complex relations between science (also medicine and technology) and the arts, literature, commerce, religion, philosophy, sports, food, and changing conceptions of gender, race, health, the human body, the human mind, and the order of nature.
Learn more about this courseIssues in Biological and Medical Ethics
An introduction to environmental ethics, addressing questions of animal (and plant) rights, the moral sense of nature, and ecological thinking. Topics include: biocentrism, the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, the Gaia hypothesis, the politics of greening, the history of environmentalism, and connections to mental health, medicine, and public health.
Learn more about this courseCritical Medical Humanities
Critical medical humanities offer an interdisciplinary and interprofessional approach to research the psychological and social effects of illness and treatments. The recent prominence of medical humanities in the academia aims at cultivating “medical citizens” in shaping the future medical culture as a democracy, where deep understanding of the less technical or measurable facets of medicine support fairness, individual and social justice, and a clinical rather than a business or sheer scientific framework.
Learn more about this courseScientific Reasoning
In this course we will examine and discuss questions such as, Why accept any scientific claim? How do scientists produce hypotheses and evaluate them? What kinds of hypotheses are there and what are they good for? How do scientists produce, collect and evaluate empirical data, big or small? Do scientists produce and use only numerical data? How do they present quantitative data visually? Can they reason with pictures as well as with numbers? How do they use data as evidence for hypotheses? Why do scientists care about hypotheses that concern a group of individuals that is larger than the ones we actually observe, test and want to deal with? How can a group of different subjects in a study help establish more general results? Aren’t all individuals different, anyway? What’s so special about hypotheses about causal links? How do experimental designs reflect the causal character of such hypotheses? Are all kinds of experimental designs equally useful? Are there different levels of strength of evidence? What can go wrong?
Learn more about this courseMedical History
This class covers the history of Western medicine from Hippocrates in Ancient Greece to the present. As we are seeing in our own time, medical history shaped human history, often in dramatic ways. We will study changing concepts of disease; past epidemics, including the Black Death, which killed about a third of Europe’s population; efforts to understand human anatomy and physiology; the history of vaccination and the germ theory of disease; the role of medical images in anatomy and pathology. There are no pre-requisites to take this class.
Learn more about this courseOccult in Western Civilization
The occult is a theme that is deeply ingrained in the history of Western civilization. From antiquity to the present, segments of our society have laid claim to an esoteric wisdom that could only be revealed to those who were worthy of its exercise. This course will deal with the primary members of the “occult sciences,” alchemy, magic, and astrology, from their roots in antiquity up to the present. We will examine the metamorphosis of the occult sciences over time in order to examine their relationships to one another and to other cultural endeavors.
Learn more about this courseComputers Limited: What Computers Cannot Do
In 1984, the TIME magazine ran a cover story on computer software. In the otherwise excellent article, an editor of a certain software magazine was quoted as saying:Put the right kind of software into a computer, and it will do whatever you want it to. There may be limits on what you can do with machines themselves, but there are no limits on what you can do with software.A simple way of summarizing this course is that it is devoted to describing and explaining the facts that refute – no, shutter! – this claim.
Learn more about this courseHistory and Philosophy of Medicine
This course will cover key issues in past and present public health and medicine. Our topics will include concepts of disease and health, contagion and infection, diagnosis, and mental health. We will look at important nineteenth-century debates on the transmission of diseases, contagion and germ theory, consciousness and the human mind. We will engage with primary and secondary sources in immersive learning experiences such as role playing: What will you do if you had to decide how best to face a cholera outbreak in nineteenth-century London, without knowing how the disease spreads? How would you go about investigating consciousness and the human mind, without MRI scans? Through these activities, we will become better equipped to answer questions that are important in the medical and health sciences today, such as how do we test for something that we cannot see and what is the role that our social values play in decision processes about health and disease.
Learn more about this courseScientific Methods
Scientific knowledge is often taken to be reliable because it arises from the use of “the scientific method”. But it is by no means easy to explicate what “the scientific method” is and what the distinct rules and procedures are that make inquiry scientific. This course introduces students to philosophical and historical debates about scientific methods. We will begin with the history of the concept “scientific method” itself: when and why did it emerge, what roles did it play in science, and how did it change over time? We then follow key debates about the idea of scientific methods.
Learn more about this courseService Learning in Medical Humanities
This final service course of the Medical Humanities Minor is an experiental educational experience, in which students participate in an organized service activity that meets community needs. The split of 20 service hours and 20 in-class studies is designed to allow practical applications of theoretical and conceptual aspects of medical humanities through first-hand experience with underserved communities.
Learn more about this courseQuantum Mysteries for Everyone
Quantum theory is the best theory we have of microscopic things, but it is also extremely hard to understand what exactly the theory is saying. We will begin this course by describing a few simple quantum experiments to see just why the theory is so strange, and then we will begin to look more closely at the formalism of the theory and at the philosophical puzzles raised by its interpretations. After suggesting several solutions, we shall adopt a more instrumental view, on which these puzzles may be considered an important resource that, if harnessed, may have some surprising implications on the way we manipulate information and perform computations. Along the way, we will learn how to think critically and carefully about science and scientific theories, and how to approach a given problem from several different philosophical angles.
Learn more about this courseQuick and Dirty Mental Operations
Human survival depends on effective gathering of huge amounts of information, adequate processing, fast learning, and controlling the environment to secure predictability and adjustment. Our brain selects what to attend to, categorize and integrate perceptual input, makes inferences, establishes emotional and physical reactions to environmental cues, and activating all other systems (affective, behavioral, and physiological) with staggering speed and efficiency. These cognitive feats are executed extremely quickly and accurately with the help of mental short cuts called “heuristics”.
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The College of Arts