PHIL 750.001 – Advanced Studies in Philosophy of Science

Instructor: Marc Lange. This course meets R 12:30 – 3:00 p.m. in PE 2066.

Recent Studies on Natural Lawhood

In virtue of what does some fact of the form “It is a law of nature that p” hold? This has long been an active area of research in the philosophy of science, and the pace of new work continues unabated. The purpose of this seminar will be to acquaint students with some recent work on this topic and to put them in a position to contribute to this ongoing investigation. (No previous knowledge of the topic is presupposed.)

The course syllabus will consist of three sections. Early in the course, I will lecture and acquaint students with the general features of the principal accounts of natural lawhood on offer. In the second (the largest) section of the course, students will present papers from the recent literature that I have selected. (I am open to suggestions.) In the final section of the course, I hope that we will workshop some draft student papers. Ideally, descendants of some of these papers will be submitted to journals after the conclusion of the course. (If there are no draft student papers available to workshop, then I will make available some of my own draft or forthcoming papers on these topics for discussion and critique—or we will simply extend the second section of the course.)

Students who take the course for credit will give presentations of recent papers in the literature (in the middle section of the course) and write a term paper. Students who take the course for “reduced writing” credit will give the same number of paper presentations as other students (and will, of course, have to attend class meetings) but will not have to write a term paper. (The number of student presentations required will depend on the number of students in the course and the number of class meetings in the second section of the course.)