Università Roma Tre

The course aims at introducing the key questions of the philosophy and methodology of science, among these the competing theories of scientific explanation, the nature of scientific method, the relation between hypotheses and evidence and the cognitive content of scientific theories in light of their historical change. While the first part of the course will consist in an introduction to these general topics (by using Okasha’s text), in the second, longer part we will read and comment three and classics authors of 20th century philosophy of science, namely Karl Popper, Hans Reichenbach, Carl Hempel and Rudolf Carnap. The fundamental problem raised in the course is the objectivity of scientific knowledge in its relationship with the human sciences

Michael Friedman, Dynamics of Reason,
Karl .R. Popper, Scienza e Filosofia, Einaudi, Torino, 2000.
S. Okasha Philosophy of Science. A very short introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002
Carl G. Hempel, Philosophy of natural sciences Prentice Hall, 1966 (chapters available on the teacher's personal website)
Rudolf Carnap, Philosophical foundations of physics, 1966 (chapters available on the teacher's personal website)
Michael Friedman, Dynamics of reason,Stanford University Press.