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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
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. |
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