General Information

Contact Information

Professor:
 Abe Stone (abestone@ucsc.edu)
Office:
 Cowell Annex A-106
Phone (office):
 459-5723
Push notification:
 Notify Abe
Website:
 http://people.ucsc.edu/~abestone/courses
Office hours:
 Thurs. 2–3pm, or by appointment

Course Description

We will read some of the classic texts which created and set the stage for later developments within the subdiscipline now known as philosophy of science. The course will be divided into two halves, corresponding to two fundamentally different views about what makes science distinctively rational (due to Rudolf Carnap and Karl Popper); in each case we will also read important works which were taken to undermine the view in question.

Course Requirements

A midterm assignment (your choice of a take-home exam or a 6–10 page paper) due Tuesday, February 21, and a final assignment (your choice of a take-home exam or a 6–10 page paper), due Wednesday, March 22.

Texts

Rudolf Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World
 (Open Court, 2003) (ISBN: 0812695232).
(This book is generally known as “the Aufbau,” following its original German title, Der logische Aufbau der Welt.)
Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast
 (Harvard, 1983) (ISBN: 0674290712).
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
 (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012) (ISBN: 0226458121).
Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
 (Routledge, 2002) (ISBN: 8130908115).

The above texts should be available at the Literary Guillotine, and they will also be put on reserve at McHenry. Readings not from texts on the above list, if any, will be available on eCommons.