PHIL 522: HISTORY OF SCIENCE II

Teacher Responsible:   Dr. Halil Turan (room B118, phone: 2105336,

e-mail: hturan@metu.edu.tr

Course capacity: 20 (Phil and STPS graduate students. Please contact the instructor if you are from another department)

Pre-requisites: None.

Course Description: Texts concentrating on various periods of the history of science will be read. The students will make presentations of articles in A History of Scientific Thought, To Save the Phenomena, Hermes, … (see ‘Texts’ below) and will be expected to prepare annotations for each topic to be presented and discussed in class.

Topics of study:

The beginnings of mathematics in Greece, Plato, ancient atomism (Lucretius), Arabic and Jewish philosophy, Europe in the thirteenth century, The Renaissance before Copernicus, Copernicus and Rheticus, truth of scientific theories, Galileo.

Texts:

Duhem, Pierre. To Save the Phenomena, trans. E. Doland, C. Maschler (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969).

Serres, Michel. Hermes, ed. J. V. Harari, trans. M. Sides, M. Anderson, L. Schehr (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982) [Chapters 6, 8, 9] 

Serres, Michel. “Gnomon: The Beginnings of Geometry in Greece” in A History of Scientific Thought, ed. M. Serres (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995).

Benoît, Paul. “Theology in the Thirteenth Century” in A History of Scientific Thought, ed. M. Serres (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1995)

Grading will be based on evaluations of annotations, presentations and the term paper.