HPS graduate seminars 2024-2025
[H] indicates an elective seminar satisfying the History requirement.
Fall 2024
Bob Batterman, Deep Learning (2622 Recent topics in philosophy of science)
In this course we will explore why and how deep learning works.
Mike Dietrich, The History of Development and Genetics (2290 Topics in History and Philosophy of Biology)
In this course we will examine the long history of the interactions between genetics and developmental biology. We will examine both the historical and biological literature on different approaches to developmental genetics from 1910 to 2010. Attitudes toward integration of development and genetics has shifted over time and region from one should not attempt to integrate them, to integration is too speculative, to integration has been accomplished because of molecular biology. Because the material in this course can become scientifically technical, seminar discussion will be supplemented by weekly background lectures.
Jon Fuller, 2101 Philosophy of Science Core Seminar
This course will focus on central topics in general philosophy of science, including explanation, confirmation, causation, scientific realism, and the interaction between social and political values and scientific inquiry. We shall combine a reading of some historically important papers along with more recent work.
Edouard Machery, 2356 Morality and the Mind / Brain Sciences
This course will examine the issues that the behavioral, cognitive, and brain sciences raise in relation to morality. The topics to be covered may be tilted towards ethical issues in these sciences (aka "neuroethics"), or the role of these sciences in understanding and explaining human morality ("moral psychology"). Topics in neuroethics may include neurological and brain enhancement, ethical and policy issues related to neuroimaging, mind control and "mindreading", and the neuroscience of free will and responsibility as these relate to criminal culpability. Examples of topics in moral psychology and moral cognition include neurodevelopment and the emergence of personhood, agency and the self, and the neural basis of moral judgements
John Norton, 2154 Theories of Confirmation
Survey of accounts of the confirmation of scientific hypotheses, including both Bayesian and non-Bayesian approaches.
David Wallace, The Everett Interpretation (2890 Topics in History and Philosophy of Physics)
The Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics (often called the ‘many worlds interpretation’), despite its apparent metaphysical absurdity, is one of the most popular ways to understand quantum mechanics among physicists and has been recognized by philosophers in the last twenty years as a serious contender for solving the quantum measurement problem.
In this course I want to give an introduction to the history, formalism, metaphysics, and epistemology of the Everett interpretation, and also to the closely related field of decoherence theory. Since the Everett interpretation has been one of my own main areas of research, I’ll be drawing fairly extensively on my own work in this course, especially on my 2012 book The Emergent Multiverse.
The technical level of this course will vary quite a bit: discussions of decoherence and consistent histories will involve a fair amount of physics, but much of the discussions on emergence and probability will use little or none. While I don’t have any formal prerequisites for this course, realistically if you have no prior exposure to quantum mechanics you may have to do a bit of work to catch up.
Porter Willams and Mark Wilson, Physics and Philosophy, 1600-1800 (2509 Special topics in History of Philosophy of Science)
This course focuses on the developments between ~1600-1800 that led to physics beginning to branch off from natural philosophy and into an independent discipline. The course is organized around Brading & Stan's Philosophical Mechanics in the Age of Reason, which will be heavily supplemented with other readings.
Spring 2025
Jon Fuller, 2785 Philosophy of Mind and Medicine
This seminar course will explore problems at the intersection of philosophy of mind and philosophy of medicine. Topics may include: abnormal states of consciousness, death, medical disorders and identity, empathy and the explanatory gap, pain, mental disorder versus neurological disorder, brain imaging, and free will and medical disorders.
Marian Gilton, 2102 History of Science Core
This is a core seminar for History and Philosophy of Science graduate students, surveying the historical development of scientific thought and providing a background in the methodology of history of science.
Sandy Mitchell, 2687 The Epistemology of Experimental Practices
Observation and experimentation have long been taken as central to the legitimacy of scientific claims. This seminar examines the assumptions and inferences involved in reasoning about experimental results.
John Norton, 2422 Probability and Statistics
We shall review the development of the notion that uncertainty and the chaos of chance may be tamed by the application of numbers. We trace its birth in the 17th century as a device for bloodlessly resolving gambling disputes; its growth through statistical theory into one on science's most important analytic tools; and its ascendance in the work of philosophically minded Bayesians as the framework of all belief.
Paolo Palmieri, 2124 Scholasticism
This seminar explores the intellectual movement known as European Scholasticism, comparing and contrasting its nature with the debates it spawned. Scholasticism inherited ancient Greek philosophy and recast it in the framework of Christianity, shaping a worldview that laid the philosophical foundations of Western civilization. History and philosophy of science, analytic philosophy, and higher education institutions such as the university have their roots in Scholasticism, which spanned the late Middles Ages to the end of the seventeenth century. We investigate the scholastic origins of fundamental philosophical categories such as method, reality, essence, science, causality, demonstration, substance, order, analysis and synthesis.
Wayne Wu, Attention, Memory and Action (2390 Special Topics in History and Philosophy of Neuroscience)
The goal of this seminar is to build a comprehensive picture of human agency, focusing on the philosophy and cognitive science of action, attention, intention and memory. We examine philosophical approaches to these phenomena and examine related controversies in psychology and neuroscience. We show how philosophy and science can be mutually supporting and illuminating.