Some additional information about this semester's courses can be found at the Arts and Sciences course descriptions page.
Spring 2023 (Term 2234)
This class will explore the history of the developments of humanity’s conceptions of space, time, and matter from ancient Greece to modern day. This exploration will be centered on the “plurality of worlds” tradition. This ancient idea was initially concerned with the existence of other cosmic systems (kosmoi) – universes composed of Earths, planets, and fixed stars, like our own. However, with developments in astronomy and cosmology over the millennia, this idea was transformed into one concerned with the possibility of other solar systems in our own universe and the possibility and nature of extraterrestrial life. We will be examining the arguments and claims which form this tradition. Along the way we will trace the development of astronomical systems and natural philosophical conceptions of matter and space. We will read and discuss many of the most influential figures in the Western tradition – Democritus, Lucretius, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Giordano Bruno, Nicolaus Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, Immanuel Kant, and others. By the end of the course, you will understand important concepts in the history of astronomy, cosmology, and philosophy and development a clear sense of the origin of the extraterrestrial life debate. This is an introductory course for students with either scientific or non-scientific backgrounds. There are no prerequisites. There are no tests and quizzes.
The emotions are relatively ubiquitous aspects of our day-to-day existence. Most of us can readily call to mind instances when we experienced joy or sorrow, when we perceived such emotions in the expressions of a friend, the behavior of a pet, or the song on the radio. But the emotions have proven to be unwieldy objects of scientific investigation. And the nature of the emotions remains hotly debated and poorly understood. In this course, we will draw on the tools of philosophy of science to probe core methodological and theoretical issues animating the affective sciences. We will begin by surveying the dominant traditions in the philosophical and scientific study of the emotions. Once we know our way around these traditions, we will examine their utility as we consider more specific questions regarding the experience, expression, and perception of the emotions: What (if anything) makes emotion different from cognition? How can we study emotions in the lab? Is anger experienced universally, across all societies and cultures? Across species? What about saudade or schadenfreude? How are emotions integrated into natural language? Can we simply read disgust off a particular contortion of muscles in a stranger’s face? Why does “Wild Horses” make (some of) us cry? No background in the sciences or philosophy is required or expected!
This course will provide students with the skills to understand and assess scientific claims that confront them in daily life. Special attention will be given to reasoning based on samples, evaluating hypotheses and causal claims, as well as common mistakes in scientific reasoning.
Mind and medicine deals with fundamental problems and questions that arise in considering the nature of mental health, mental illness, and branches of medicine that aim to promote mental health and treat mental illness. We will begin by considering the concepts of ‘health’, ‘disease’ and ‘illness’ in general, and several different models of medicine. From there we will move on to a consideration of the nature of explanation in medicine generally. We will examine some explanatory successes in the domain of physical health and disease, and consider how those successes were achieved. In the second half of the course we will look at controversies over the question of whether there is such a thing as mental illness, and if so, how one is to define, diagnose and treat it. In order to better understand what is at stake, we will explore these controversies by focusing on a specific mental illness, schizophrenia. Looking at recent research on schizophrenia will allow us to see the extent to which the kind of understanding we have achieved in physical medicine is or is not to be expected with serious mental illness. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to identify and analyze different philosophical approaches to selected issues in medicine and psychiatry; have gained insight into how to read and critically interpret philosophical arguments; and have developed skills that will enable them to think clearly about foundational questions as future or current health care providers, policy makers, and consumers. This course is also part of a core sequence leading to certification in the Conceptual Foundations of Medicine Certificate Program, and is a companion course to HPS 0613 (Morality and Medicine) but may be taken independently. The course is of particular interest to pre-medical and pre-health care students
Mind and medicine deals with fundamental problems and questions that arise in considering the nature of mental health, mental illness, and branches of medicine that aim to promote mental health and treat mental illness. We will begin by considering the concepts of ‘health’, ‘disease’ and ‘illness’ in general, and several different models of medicine. From there we will move on to a consideration of the nature of explanation in medicine generally. We will examine some explanatory successes in the domain of physical health and disease, and consider how those successes were achieved. In the second half of the course we will look at controversies over the question of whether there is such a thing as mental illness, and if so, how one is to define, diagnose and treat it. In order to better understand what is at stake, we will explore these controversies by focusing on a specific mental illness, schizophrenia. Looking at recent research on schizophrenia will allow us to see the extent to which the kind of understanding we have achieved in physical medicine is or is not to be expected with serious mental illness. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to identify and analyze different philosophical approaches to selected issues in medicine and psychiatry; have gained insight into how to read and critically interpret philosophical arguments; and have developed skills that will enable them to think clearly about foundational questions as future or current health care providers, policy makers, and consumers. This course is also part of a core sequence leading to certification in the Conceptual Foundations of Medicine Certificate Program, and is a companion course to HPS 0613 (Morality and Medicine) but may be taken independently. The course is of particular interest to pre-medical and pre-health care students
Mind and medicine deals with fundamental problems and questions that arise in considering the nature of mental health, mental illness, and branches of medicine that aim to promote mental health and treat mental illness. We will begin by considering the concepts of ‘health’, ‘disease’ and ‘illness’ in general, and several different models of medicine. From there we will move on to a consideration of the nature of explanation in medicine generally. We will examine some explanatory successes in the domain of physical health and disease, and consider how those successes were achieved. In the second half of the course we will look at controversies over the question of whether there is such a thing as mental illness, and if so, how one is to define, diagnose and treat it. In order to better understand what is at stake, we will explore these controversies by focusing on a specific mental illness, schizophrenia. Looking at recent research on schizophrenia will allow us to see the extent to which the kind of understanding we have achieved in physical medicine is or is not to be expected with serious mental illness. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to identify and analyze different philosophical approaches to selected issues in medicine and psychiatry; have gained insight into how to read and critically interpret philosophical arguments; and have developed skills that will enable them to think clearly about foundational questions as future or current health care providers, policy makers, and consumers. This course is also part of a core sequence leading to certification in the Conceptual Foundations of Medicine Certificate Program, and is a companion course to HPS 0613 (Morality and Medicine) but may be taken independently. The course is of particular interest to pre-medical and pre-health care students
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This course offers an introductory survey to Chinese philosophy (for instance, Confucianism, Daosim, and Neo-Confucianism) and its relation to science. We will study primary and secondary sources with an aim to address questions like: Did science develop in China? What about modern science? What conception of science should we use in such discussions? Is there any problem in asking such questions? Is Chinese philosophy beneficial to the development of science? If yes, does it contribute to science in ways that help constitute a scientific tradition that is different from modern science? In what sense are Chinese traditions of philosophy and science similar to or different from the Western traditions? There are no prerequisites for this course.
The first few decades of the 20th century witnessed the birth of two of the most strikingly beautiful and deeply counterintuitive theories in the history of science: relativity and quantum mechanics. Despite their immense success, there remain thorny questions about what these theories tell us about what the world is like and our place in the world. There also remain important conceptual questions about how best to formulate and understand these theories. In this course, we will consider metaphysical, epistemological, and conceptual questions that arise from relativity and quantum mechanics. These include questions about the nature of space and time, the relation between matter and spacetime, the quantum measurement problem, ‘interpretations’ of quantum mechanics, and quantum non-locality. If time permits, we will briefly touch upon some questions in the general theory of relativity and in quantum field theory. We will find that the tools of philosophy are useful in analyzing these issues emerging from physics.
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The aim of this course is to provide a broad survey of some the most fundamental and general questions in philosophy of science, and to cultivate your ability to think through these difficult questions in a clear and critical way. The course is divided in two main parts. In the first part, we follow a text-book presentation of key questions such as: "What is science?", "Is there a unique scientific method?", and "Is science aiming at true theories, or does it only aim at theories that are consistent with observable phenomena?" We tackle these questions by looking at issues such as the problem of induction and the nature of scientific explanation. We critically assess the main philosophical views surrounding these questions and issues, and we consider the relevance of historical and sociological approaches to the philosophy of science. After the midterm we will revisit these issues by reading some of the primary literature, including some older classics and some more recent articles that showcase current approaches to these issues. Throughout the course we will be concerned with applications of these general concerns to particular issues in the physical sciences, the life sciences, and the cognitive sciences.
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10-26-22