Spring
2009
- Philosophy
of Science (lectures; module guide--I've
designed this course)
The philosophy of science can
be approached in at
least two different ways: ontologically and epistemically. According to
the former approach, one may be interested in questions to do with the
nature of scientific theories, scientific models, phenomena and
scientific laws, and even with the nature of science itself (what is it
that makes something a science?). Although we will discuss two
important ontological topics in the second part of this course, this
course will predominantly be concerned with epistemological questions:
How is scientific knowledge established and how certain is this
knowledge, which role do theories and experiments play respectively in
the production of this knowledge, can we have any knowledge about
things we cannot observe, and is there any (cumulative) progress in the
knowledge we acquire about the world?
Starting
with a challenge to a ‘common sense view’ about science, we
will work our way through the classical topics of induction, Popper’s
falsificationism, the “historical turn” brought about by T.S. Kuhn, and
appreciated in Lakatos’s methodology of research programmes. We will
consider different notions of natural laws, scientific explanation and
at the end of the semester, this module will introduce the main
positions of the realism-antirealism debate, arguably the most
important debate within contemporary philosophy of science.
- Philosophy
of Psychology (lectures and seminars; module guide--I've
designed this course)
Psychology is a diverse
discipline. It includes
clinical psychology, social psychology, comparative psychology,
evolutionary psychology, forensic psychology, psychoanalysis and
others. The emphasis in this course, however, lies with the philosophy
of cognitive psychology, i.e. psychology of perception, thinking,
problem solving, intelligence etc.
The course is divided into
roughly three parts. In
the first part, we are going to discuss central issues in the field of
Cognitive Science, which seeks understanding about cognitive behaviour
by trying to model it computationally. In the second part, we shall see
that one can be realist, instrumentalist, or eliminitavist about
propositional states. In this context we shall also discuss the two
theories of other minds that have been defended in the philosophical
and psychological literature. In the third part of this course, we will
turn our attention to neuro-psychological and -biological science.
Here, we shall discuss the nature of contemporary neurobiological
evidence and its pitfalls, the theses of modularity and localisation
that underlie all contemporary neurobiological research, and we will
ask what constitutes neurobiological explanations. At the end, we will
ask whether any moral limits should be put on psychological
research.
- Indpendent
Studies (seminars)
Spring
2008
Winter
2007
Spring
2006
Spring
2007