Philosophy of Science

Course No. 4100 (36 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)

Taught by Jeffrey L. Kasser
Colorado State University
Ph.D., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

1. Science and Philosophy
2. Popper and the Problem of Demarcation
3. Further Thoughts on Demarcation
4. Einstein, Measurement, and Meaning
5. Classical Empiricism
6. Logical Positivism and Verifiability
7. Logical Positivism, Science, and Meaning
8. Holism
9. Discovery and Justification
10. Induction as Illegitimate
11. Some Solutions and a New Riddle
12. Instances and Consequences
13. Kuhn and the Challenge of History
14. Revolutions and Rationality
15. Assessment of Kuhn
16. For and Against Method
17. Sociology, Postmodernism, and Science Wars
18. (How) Does Science Explain?
19. Putting the Cause Back in "Because"
20. Probability, Pragmatics, and Unification
21. Laws and Regularities
22. Laws and Necessity
23. Reduction and Progress
24. Reduction and Physicalism
25. New Views of Meaning and Reference
26. Scientific Realism
27. Success, Experience, and Explanation
28. Realism and Naturalism
29. Values and Objectivity
30. Probability
31. Bayesianism
32. Problems with Bayesianism
33. Entropy and Explanation
34. Species and Reality
35. The Elimination of Persons?
36. Philosophy and Science



"Science can't be free of philosophy any more than baseball can be free of physics." With this bold intellectual swing for the fences, philosopher Jeffrey L. Kasser launches an ambitious and exciting inquiry into what makes science science, using the tools of philosophy to ask:

Why is science so successful?
Is there such a thing as the scientific method?
How do we distinguish science from pseudoscience?
Is science rational, cumulative, and progressive?
Focusing his investigation on the vigorous debate over the nature of science that unfolded during the past 100 years, Professor Kasser covers important philosophers such as Karl Popper, W. V. Quine, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, Imre Lakatos, Carl Hempel, Nelson Goodman, and Bas van Fraassen.

All of these thinkers responded in one way or another to logical positivism, the dominant movement influencing the philosophy of science during the first half of the 20 th century. Logical positivism attempted to ground science exclusively in what could be known through direct experience and logic.

It sounds reasonable, but logical positivism proved to be riddled with serious problems, and its eventual demise is an object lesson in how truly difficult it is

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