Courses

Quick, picture a scientist.  Is he a crazy man with bad hair?  A beautiful woman in a lab coat?  A bespectacled recluse with allergies?  Has Hollywood played a role in shaping your mental image?

In this course we’ll attempt to answer these questions by exploring the portrayal of scientists in 7 pairs of films.  Through class discussion, readings, and reflective writing we’ll identify major archetypes, such as the “mad scientist” and the “scientist savior,” and we’ll examine how historical events reinforced this imagery.  We’ll also discuss how the cinematic stereotype of the scientist – nerdy, socially awkward, physically weak – has shaped our view of today's scientific community.  Grades will be based on seven written reflections, one reading selection, and one final paper.

As everyone knows, the claim that Darwinian Evolution is a mere theory and the assertion that Intelligent Design should be given equal billing has become a major issue in American public education.  Where did this confrontation originate, and is it representative of the relationship between science and religion over the long term?  Have religion and science always been at loggerheads, and are they fated to remain so?

The aim of this course is to look at the relation between science and religion (mainly Christianity) from both a historical and a philosophical perspective. It intends to show that the relation between science and religion is extremely complex and impossible to understand with the use of simplistic conceptualizations like ‘conservative religion vs. progressive science.’ We will examine the relation between natural knowledge and theology during the Middle Ages and see that the latter were not the ‘dark’ period once thought to be. We will look at the revolutionary developments in both science and religion during the course of the 16th and 17th centuries and examine closely the events that led to Galileo’s trial. Further, we will consider the emergence of Darwin’s theory of evolution, the religious responses to it as well as the complex relation between Evolution, Creationism, and Religion in modern day America.

How did various thinkers from the past explain the physiological processes in sex? This course addresses that question in a survey from the Hippocratic corpus in Ancient Greece to Victorian science in the 19th century. Topics we address include the study of anatomy, explanations of the orgasm, discovery of the clitoris, varying theories of seeds, and debates about what contribution the female makes to reproduction.  We will also look at problems with disease and its treatment, most notably Hysteria and Syphilis. During the course, the class will take a trip to both the Lilly Library and the Kinsey Institute.

The following is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Sumerian epic thought to have its roots in oral tradition over 5000 years ago. Beer and bread are here considered the hallmarks of modern human culture, by partaking of them the wild man-beast Enkidu was transformed into a human.

“Enkidu knew nothing about eating bread for food, and of drinking beer he had not been taught...Enkidu ate the food until he was sated, he drank the beer – seven jugs! – and became expansive and sang with joy! He was elated and his face glowed. He splashed his shaggy body with water...and turned into a human.”

Beer has been an important part of human culture since the advent of agriculture. Beer has been a safe alternative to water, a source of nourishment, and for at least the last 300 years, beer has been big business with annual revenues of some modern brewers topping $15 billion. Brewing typically leads industry in technological innovation and it has played a role in major advancements in our scientific understanding of the world...and not just by providing drunken inspiration.
This course will examine the cultural, scientific and technological aspects of beer and its production. We will explore the place of beer in ancient as well as modern life. We will discuss the production of beer throughout history and some of the major advancements in brewing technology. Finally, we will discuss the role beer and brewing has played in important scientific achievements in microbiology, biotechnology and physics.

Where did modern science come from? Is it a stockpile of technique and knowledge that has accumulated slowly and steadily over the centuries? This course presents a more complex and dynamic picture, in which the history of science also takes unexpected twists, turns and conceptual leaps, in response to changing social, political and religious interests, and to
shifting scientific assumptions, methods, and forms of organization. The course introduces the most important formative steps in the scientific tradition, each of which overturned
earlier ways of investigating and understanding nature. These include Aristotelian physics, Ptolmaic astronomy and Galenic medicine in the ancient and Medieval world; the scientific revolutions of the 15th- through the 18th centuries that ushered in Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, and new ideas about physiology and medicine; the chemical and
Darwinian revolutions; and the rise of modern physics and other 20th-century innovations and problems.

Where did modern science come from? Is it a stockpile of technique and knowledge that has accumulated slowly and steadily over the centuries? This course presents a more complex and dynamic picture, in which the history of science also takes unexpected twists, turns and conceptual leaps, in response to changing social, political and religious interests, and to shifting scientific assumptions, methods, and forms of organization. The course introduces the most important formative steps in the scientific tradition, each of which overturned earlier ways of investigating and understanding nature. These include Aristotelian physics, Ptolmaic astronomy and Galenic medicine in the ancient and Medieval world; the scientific revolutions of the 15th- through the 18th centuries that ushered in Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics, and new ideas about physiology and medicine; the chemical and Darwinian revolutions; and the rise of modern physics and other 20th-century innovations and problems.

Science is the most successful way humans have found to produce knowledge of the world. But the success of science lies in the fact that it is not just a collection of facts and theories -- science's success comes from critical attitudes and methodologies.

This course covers topics essential for understanding scientific reasoning.  By the end of the course, students will understand the concepts of logical validity and soundness, laws of nature and scientific models, causation, principles of statistical reasoning, experimental design, and pseudoscience.  Other topics may include ethics in science, decision theory, and scientific realism.

Science is the most successful way humans have found to produce knowledge of the world. But the success of science lies in the fact that it is not just a collection of facts and theories --science's success comes from critical attitudes and methodologies.

This course covers topics essential for understanding scientific reasoning.  By the end of the course, students will understand the concepts of logical validity and soundness, laws of nature and scientific models, causation, principles of statistical reasoning, experimental design, and pseudoscience.  Other topics may include ethics in science, decision theory, and scientific realism.

We will study both the history of public health and medicine, starting with the ancient Greeks, and moving up to contemporary problems in these fields.  When and how did modern medical understandings of the body emerge?  How did people learn how the body was put together, such as the circulatory system, the beating of the heart, or the functioning of the kidneys?  When was the germ theory of disease developed? What is the biggest cause of the recent, 20th Century reduction in infant mortality in the US and England?  Our contemporary topics will include the issues of genetic diseases and predispositions.  What does it mean to say that a person “has a gene for” heart disease or breast cancer?  Can they be discriminated against at work or in health care on this basis?  What are the ethics of smoking, alcohol use, and eating right?  We will read about the AIDS/HIV case as a modern crisis in public health.  What are new, emerging challenges to medicine and public health?  What are the ethics of the distribution of expensive treatments or rare drugs?

The course will focus on four physical theories that were developed in the turn of the last century, namely, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, special relativity and general relativity. It will start examining the standard of classical physics these theories complemented or challenged, and will emphasize both the historical aspects as well the philosophical questions that surround their development and evaluation. Throughout the course the use of mathematics will be kept to an absolute minimum (no more than basic high school algebra and geometry will be needed), and emphasis will be given to historical and conceptual analysis. We will cover topics such as irreversibility and the thermodynamic arrow in time, the origins and interpretations of probability and statistical quantities in statistical physics, chaos and dynamical instability, special relativistic principles, effects and paradoxes, time machines, black holes and gravitational lenses in general relativistic spacetimes, quantum interpretations, jumps and paradoxes, quantum logic, information and computing, Feynman diagrams, strings, the fate of the distinction between particles and fields, the fate of the classical concepts of matter and causality, and the role of symmetries and unification. Yes, along the way, we will discuss the significance of Maxwell’s demon, Schrödinger’s cat, Heisenberg’s uncertainty and Einstein’s clocks.

This course provides an advanced introduction to the history of the modern sciences. It emphasizes recent secondary literature as it surveys key events in and the variety of historians’ approaches to the physical, biological, medical, earth- and human sciences. Overarching themes include the history of scientific ideas, science in national and international contexts, and scientific disciplines and institutions. Each week class participants will take up a book or selection of articles for critical analysis. After brief remarks by the instructor, participants will discuss the contents, point of view, aims, and methodology of the selections, as well as their places within the scholarly tradition. It is hoped that students will not only gain wide familiarity with the construction of modern science, but also a deeper appreciation of its historiography. Intended for beginning grad students and advanced undergraduates. There are no particular prerequisites, but some knowledge of modern science or modern European or American history will be helpful.

This course will trace the historical development of the philosophy of science from approximately early 17th century to the mid-twentieth century, beginning with a quick survey of the philosophies of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, then turning to the philosophy of Newtonian science developed by Immanuel Kant, its developments and reactions, and ending with French conventionalism, logical positivism, Popper and Quine. In the twentieth century philosophy of science begins to take shape as a specialized discipline within philosophy more generally. Its problems are motivated and framed by the interplay of earlier philosophical questions and more recent revolutionary developments in nineteenth century science: the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the wave theory of light and electrodynamics, thermodynamics and the conservation of energy, and molecular-atomic theory. Canons of scientific methodology were introduced in the 19th century in Britain by Herschel, Whewell and Mill. Work in philosophy of science was undertaken next by professional scientists attempting to come to terms with these new developments-in particular, by Herman Von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré. Around the turn of the century, philosophy of science was stimulated once again by revolutionary developments: Einstein relativity theory, on the one hand, and new work in logic and the foundations of mathematics by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and David Hilbert, on the other.  Philosophical developments took place as well, such as neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. Philosophy of science was now pursued by professional philosophers, although most trained in the sciences, in particular Karl Popper and the members of the so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivists such as Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath and Rudolph Carnap.  Neurath and Ernst Cassirer try to engage the social sciences as well. The work of all these philosophers sets the stage for most of post-war twentieth century philosophy of science.

This course provides an advanced introduction to the history of the modern sciences. It emphasizes recent secondary literature as it surveys key events in and the variety of historians’ approaches to the physical, biological, medical, earth- and human sciences. Overarching themes include the history of scientific ideas, science in national and international contexts, and scientific disciplines and institutions. Each week class participants will take up a book or selection of articles for critical analysis. After brief remarks by the instructor, participants will discuss the contents, point of view, aims, and methodology of the selections, as well as their places within the scholarly tradition. It is hoped that students will not only gain wide familiarity with the construction of modern science, but also a deeper appreciation of its historiography. Intended for beginning grad students and advanced undergraduates. There are no particular prerequisites, but some knowledge of modern science or modern European or American history will be helpful.

This course will trace the historical development of the philosophy of science from approximately early 17th century to the mid-twentieth century, beginning with a quick survey of the philosophies of Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Newton and Leibniz, then turning to the philosophy of Newtonian science developed by Immanuel Kant, its developments and reactions, and ending with French conventionalism, logical positivism, Popper and Quine. In the twentieth century philosophy of science begins to take shape as a specialized discipline within philosophy more generally. Its problems are motivated and framed by the interplay of earlier philosophical questions and more recent revolutionary developments in nineteenth century science: the discovery of non-Euclidean geometries, the wave theory of light and electrodynamics, thermodynamics and the conservation of energy, and molecular-atomic theory. Canons of scientific methodology were introduced in the 19th century in Britain by Herschel, Whewell and Mill. Work in philosophy of science was undertaken next by professional scientists attempting to come to terms with these new developments-in particular, by Herman Von Helmholtz, Ernst Mach, Pierre Duhem and Henri Poincaré. Around the turn of the century, philosophy of science was stimulated once again by revolutionary developments: Einstein relativity theory, on the one hand, and new work in logic and the foundations of mathematics by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and David Hilbert, on the other.  Philosophical developments took place as well, such as neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. Philosophy of science was now pursued by professional philosophers, although most trained in the sciences, in particular Karl Popper and the members of the so-called Vienna Circle of logical positivists such as Moritz Schlick, Otto Neurath and Rudolph Carnap.  Neurath and Ernst Cassirer try to engage the social sciences as well. The work of all these philosophers sets the stage for most of post-war twentieth century philosophy of science.

This course will use Agrippa von Nettesheim’s De occulta philosophia (On Occult Philosophy) as a way into the study of magic and the concept of “the occult” during the Renaissance.  Agrippa’s text serves as an ideal entry point for this undertaking for several reasons.  First, Agrippa employs the entire literature of magical, astrological, and alchemical literature available to him in the early sixteenth century, making his De occulta philosophia  an ideal introduction to the genre of “hidden knowledge” during his period.  Second, Agrippa’s work exercised a massive influence on later thinkers and practitioners, including alchemists, architectural theorists, and visual artists.   Albrecht Dürer himself is reputed to have used a draft of the De occulta philosophia  in composing one of his most famous images.  Even writers on horticulture, animal husbandry, and the mechanical arts made use of Agrippa’s work.   Indeed, the De occulta philosophia spawned a genre of books on natural magic that fed, curiously, into the reformation of natural knowledge culminating in the work of Francis Bacon.  Third, and perhaps most importantly, the De occulta philosophia is a fascinating work that lends itself to multiple readings.  The most striking thing about the work, perhaps, lies in its strange affirmation of “occult” pursuits only a few years after Agrippa lampooned them in his masterwork of skepticism, the De vanitate scientiarum (On the Vanity of the Sciences) of 1527.  Yet as Vittoria Perrone Compagni, the most recent editor of the De occulta has argued, Agrippa’s appeal to the principle of dispersa intentio (dispersion of knowledge) opens the possibility that the De occulta should not be read as a simple encyclopedia of the “occult arts,” but that the text has a hidden meaning.   The pursuit of a subtext (or multiple subtexts) in the De occulta will form yet another topic in the course.  Agrippa’s two principle works, the De occulta and De vanitate, are available in early modern English translations.  We will use both of these translations with reference to the Latin only for obscure passages – hence reading knowledge of Latin will not be required for the course.   Students will be encouraged to bring their disciplinary specializations to the course in the interest of exploring demarcations between “occult” and public forms of knowledge over a variety of fields.    

This graduate seminar in philosophy of biology will be a survey of both old and new core issues in the field.  We will be working from two excellent texts, one by Elliott Sober, and one by Paul Griffiths and Kim Sterelny, listed below, as well as a useful collection of primary sources edited by Elliott Sober, and texts on Oncourse.  Our focus will be on evolutionary biology, as this reflects the primary focus of the field, but we will also touch on other topics.  One new addition to the syllabus will concern the notion of “evolutionary mismatch,” as I am currently involved in a large project, with David Sloan Wilson and Elliott Sober, along with 30 biologists pursuing cases of mismatch.  In the course, we will cover foundational notions such as fitness, adaptation and adaptationism, units of selection, drift, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, (both good and not-so-good), niche construction, and gene/cultural evolution. I will also survey the class for additional topics you wish to be covered.

Modern science is a highly specialized activity, pursued by trained experts at research labs or universities. But of course, science is not confined to the laboratory or academy. The outcome of scientific research informs and shapes our society and culture at all levels. We encounter science in the media, in museums, or in the court room. Politicians, lawyers, and other professionals draw on, assess, and sometimes seek to restrict scientific activity. This course explores how science engages with the public, how the public engages with science, and how the relation between science and the public has changed over time. Beginning in the 18th century, we will focus on three related topics.

The forms of engagement: How are complex scientific issues made palatable to wider audiences? We will survey different forms of science communication, such as popular lectures and magazines, museum displays, novels, and films. We will discuss how audiences’ responses shape the course of science, and whether basic scientific literacy is sufficient to understand and evaluate scientific activity.

The sites of engagement: Where do the exchanges between scientists and public audiences occur? We will consider sites and spaces such as museums and zoos, cabinets of curiosity, lecture halls, court rooms, and mass media. How do these sites facilitate – or perhaps impede – the flow of information?

The purposes and effects of engagement: What are the goals of science communication? Why do scientists, science educators, and science journalists care about what non-scientists think about science? Have these goals changed since the late 18th century? Why might lay audiences engage with science; what are their interests and expectations?

The occult is a theme that is deeply ingrained in the history of Western Civilization.  From the ancient world to the present, segments of our society have laid claim to an esoteric wisdom that could only be revealed to those who are worthy of its exercise.  Such “occult” pursuits as alchemy, astrology, and magic played an important role in the formation of modern science during the scientific revolution of seventeenth century, and subsequently had a major impact on poetry, music and the pictorial arts.  And yet, if we consider pursuits that are usually deemed to make up “the occult,” what these fields have to do with one another is not immediately clear.  What does alchemy, an artisanal pursuit related to metallurgy, have in common with divinatory practices such as astrology, palm-reading, or crystal-gazing?  What does witchcraft have to do with extraterrestrial life?  The Occult in Western Civilization will address these questions and others.  It will also argue that the occult sciences-especially alchemy, astrology, and natural magic-were originally predicted on quite reasonable bases consistent with the best science and philosophy of their time, however, they may have been altered in late twentieth-century culture.  By thinking carefully about the relationships among science, philosophy, and those disciplines traditionally classified as “occult,” students will learn about the nature of scientific knowledge more generally.  The basic goals of the course, then, will be to instill a historical understanding of the occult while at the same time stimulating philosophical reflection on the nature of scientific knowledge in general.