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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
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Current
Course Pages PHIL 3710: History
and Philosophy of Science, Part 1 -- From Aristotle to Galileo (Fall
2011) 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 3320: Theory of
Knowledge (Fall 2011) Twentieth century
epistemology is fragmented along a number of definite fault lines. This
course focuses on two of these: the dispute over the adequacy of epistemic
foundationalism in the face of two classical skeptical challenges (Cartesian
skepticism and the problem of induction), and the recent controversy
regarding epistemic internalism and the attendant move to naturalize
epistemology. Using both classic
statements of the issues and some of the best recent articles, we will
examine the way in which one’s position on these issues shapes one’s entire
philosophical outlook. Along the way we will explore related controversies
regarding the analytic/synthetic distinction, semantic knowledge, and
conceptual analysis. By the end of the course, students should have not only
an excellent feel for the terrain in contemporary epistemology – the broad
context in which other debates may be located – but also a clear
understanding of the considerations that pull us in each direction on these
critical matters. |
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