Philosophy of science seminar

Márton Gömöri and László E. Szabó

The aim of the course is to review and discuss the most important issues in philosophy of science, on the bases of the following readings:

• M. Schlick: Positivism and Realism,in The Philosophy of Science, R. Boyd et al. (eds.) The MIT Press, Boston 1992.
  
  
• H. Reichenbach: Meaning, in Experience and Prediction: An Analysis of the Foundations and the Structure of Knowledge
  
  
• P. Bridgman: The Operational Character of Scientific Concepts, in The Philosophy of Science, R. Boyd et al. (eds.) The MIT Press, Boston 1992.
  
  
• A. Garfinkel: Reductionism, in The Philosophy of Science, R. Boyd et al. (eds.) The MIT Press, Boston 1992.
  
  
• T. Kuhn: Scientific Revolutions, in The Philosophy of Science, R. Boyd et al. (eds.) The MIT Press, Boston 1992.
  
  
• Arthur Fine: The Natural Ontological Attitude, in The Philosophy of Science, R. Boyd et al. (eds.) The MIT Press, Boston 1992.
  
  
• M. Colyvan: Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy of Mathematics, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2004 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
  
  
• W. V. O. Quine: Two Dogmas of Empiricism, Philosophical Review 60 (1951) 20–43.
  
  
• W. V. O. Quine: On Empirically Equivalent Systems of the World,  Erkenntnis  9 (1975), pp. 313-328.
  
  
• B. van Fraassen: Arguments concerning scientific realism, Ch. 2 in The Scientific Image, Oxford University Press Inc., New York 1980.
  
  
• W. V. O. Quine: Epistemology Naturalized, in: Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, Columbia University Press, New York.
  
  
• L. E. Szabó: Meaning, Truth, and Physics, In G. Hofer-Szabó, L. Wroński  (eds.),   Making it Formally Explicit, European Studies in Philosophy of Science 6. (Springer International Publishing, 2017) DOI:
  10.1007/978-3-319-55486-0_9. (Preprint: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/12891/)
  
  
• L. Carroll:  "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles" which is available here: http://www.ditext.com/carroll/tortoise.html
  
  
• Selection from Plato's Meno. The text is available from the online library. The item is "The Dialogues of Plato, Volume 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Gorgias, Menexenus", please read the section "A Proof of Recollection" (pp. 164-171)
  
  
• Hilary Putnam, Brains in a vat, http://ieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_2908.pdf
  
  
• Bruce MacLennan, "Synthetic Ethology - An Approach to the Study of Communication". In Artificial Life II: The Second Workshop on the Synthesis and Simulation of Living Systems, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, proceedings Vol. X, edited by Christopher G. Langton, Charles Taylor, J. Doyne Farmer, and Steen Rasmussen.  Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1992, pp. 631-658.  (Available from the online library.)