|
Timothy J. McGrew |
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).
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
James Morrison's Astrolabe page
Online Memory
Improvement Course
|
Current
Course Pages PHIL 3710: History
and Philosophy of Science, Part 1 -- From Aristotle to Galileo (Fall 2012) 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. PHIL 3550: Philosophy
of Science (Fall 2012) This course is a study of
central issues in the philosophy of science. Starting with the “textbook”
model of scientific inquiry and a detailed examination of its inadequacies,
we will explore the history of science and some of the philosophical problems
connected with imagination, thought experiments, confirmation and
disconfirmation of theories, holism, relativism, falsifiability and
pseudo-science, induction, probability and statistical inference, prediction,
explanation, empirical equivalence, realism and many other related themes. At
the end of the course we will examine how some of these ideas are brought
into sharp focus in more modern physics. |
|
|