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Timothy J. McGrew

What's New Saturday, January 22, 2005. Here is an Adobe PDF file of the paper “Has Plantinga Refuted the Historical Argument?” which was a keynote address to the Pacific Division meeting of the Society of Christian Philosophers in Los Angeles, February 2004 and appeared in Philosophia Christi 6 (2004): 7-26. [The PDF format is necessary to preserve a few diagrams. The Adobe Acrobat Reader is free for downloading on the web.] Sunday, January 04, 2004. Here is a more or less final draft of "Confirmation, Heuristics, and Explanatory Reasoning," which appeared in the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 54 (2003): 553-67. Monday, September 17, 2001. The most recent version of "Toward a Rational Reconstruction of Design Inferences" is now available. Tuesday, May 8, 2001. An almost typo-free version of "Direct Inference and the Problem of Induction" is now available. This is roughly the same paper as the version in The Monist 84 (2001). Monday, May 7, 2001. "A Defense of Strong Foundationalism" appears here with a small correction from the version found in Louis Pojman’s anthology The Theory of Knowledge: Classical and Contemporary Readings, 2nd ed. (1998). Annotated Bibliographies A number of people have told me that they have found the following brief bibliographies useful, so I am leaving them online. They are not research bibliographies but rather suggestions for those who are just beginning to enter the literature on a given topic. Abductive Inference and Inference to the Best Explanation Bayesian Reasoning Confirmation Theory Past Course Pages Philosophy 6320: Epistemology Seminar (Fall 2008) Philosophy 5700: Philosophical Applications of Probability Theory (Spring 2008) Honors 470 / Philosophy 470: History and Philosophy of Science, part 1: from Aristotle through Galileo (2006) Teaching Links James Morrison's Astrolabe page Retrograde Motion Simulator Solar System Simulator Homepages of Friends Lydia McGrew Dangerous Idea Fides Quaerens Intellectum Maverick Philosopher Sloan Lee’s Virtual Office The Constructive Curmudgeon Memory Links The Memory Page Online Memory Improvement Course Chess Links West Michigan Chess Kenilworthian Chess Cafe ChessBase Internet Chess Club The Week in Chess Correspondence Chess Online Play Chess Chess Games Free Chess Chess Art

Current Course Pages Honors 4700: Honors History and Philosophy of Science, Part 2 (Spring 2010) This course examines the history and philosophy of science from the late 1600’s to the late 20th century. Beginning with the background to Newton’s Principia Mathematica, we will investigate the 18th century controversy over the nature of light, the gradual development of thermodynamics in the 19th century, and some of the key achievements of 20th century science such as relativity, quantum theory, and chaos theory. Although the course does not have any science or math prerequisites, it is not “physics for poets.” Students who do not have a math background should come prepared to scrape the rust off of their high school algebra and geometry. No calculus or statistics is required; we will develop what we need as we proceed. Philosophy 6000: Graduate Seminar: History and Philosophy of Science, Part I (Spring 2010) This course is an exploration of themes in the history and philosophy of science, with special attention to the life and work of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler and Galileo. Beginning with the necessary background in the physics and astronomy of Aristotle, we will study the development of the modern view with an eye to the conceptual and epistemological problems encountered in the transition to the new physics and astronomy, culminating with a close reading of most of Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. In order to keep the course within manageable bounds, we will focus primarily on astronomy and dynamics, though there will be interesting sidelights thrown on mathematics as well as biology, chemistry and other branches of science.