Fall 2013

Overview

This is a graduate-level reading group in philosophy of science, aiming at breadth rather than depth. The reading list will evolve as the course progresses. A BibTeX file containing all the references below can be found here. Unless otherwise advertised, we meet in the Lewis White Beck Memorial Library in Lattimore Hall, at 5pm–7pm.

Schedule

Wednesday 11 September

• Nagel, Ernest. 1961. The Structure of Science: Problems in the Logic of Scientific Explanation, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, Chapter 11.

Wednesday 18 September

• Sklar, Lawrence. 1967. “Types of Inter-Theoretic Reduction”, in The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 18, No. 2, August, pp. 109–124. URI: http://www.jstor.org/stable/686579

Wednesday 25 September

• Hooker, Clifford A. 1981. “Towards a General Theory of Reduction. Part I: Historical and Scientific Setting”, in Dialogue, Vol. 20, No. 1, March, pp. 38–59. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0012217300023088 [PDF]

Wednesday 2 October

• Strevens, Michael. 2012. “The Explanatory Role of Irreducible Properties”, in Noûs, Vol. 46, No. 4, December, pp. 754–780. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2010.00802.x

Wednesday 9 October

• Strevens continued.

Wednesday 23 October

• Beatty, John. 1995. “The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis”, in Wolters and Lennox (Ed), Concepts, Theories, and Rationality in the Biological Sciences, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, pp. 45–81. [PDF]

Wednesday 6 November

• Sober, Elliott. 1997. “Two Outbreaks of Lawlessness in Recent Philosophy of Biology”, in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 64, No. 4, December, pp. S458-S467. URI: http://www.jstor.org/stable/188425

Wednesday 20 November

• Sober, Elliott. 2011. “A Priori Causal Models of Natural Selection”, in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 89, No. 4, pp. 571–589. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2010.535006
• Lange, Marc and Rosenberg, Alexander. 2011. “Can There be A Priori Causal Models of Natural Selection?”, in Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 89, No. 4, pp. 591–599. URI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2011.598175