PHIL 850.001 – Research Seminar in Philosophy of Science

Instructor: John T. Roberts. This course meets M 3:00 – 5:30 p.m. in CW 213.

This will be a seminar on the related topics of causation and counterfactual conditionals. We will begin with a careful read-through of some of the classic papers on these topics (by e.g. Nelson Goodman, Nancy Cartwright, and David Lewis), and then we will turn to more recent work, by people like James Woodward, Huw Price. We will spend at least part of the semester learning the technical ins and outs of the interventionist approach to causation, and at least part of it looking at some of the technical problems about formal semantics for counterfactuals. We will read at least some brand new, unpublished work by the instructor.