The nature of life – what it is, how we recognize it, and what distinguishes it from nonliving matter – remains an “unsolved mystery” of contemporary science and philosophy. In this seminar, we will attend to issues surrounding the thesis of abiogenesis and the origin of life, the emergence of the biological sciences in the 20th century and its status of biology vis-á-vis the physical sciences, and the influence of Schrödinger's work on the topic on the science of the time. Then we will analyze the Viking lander experiments, and the ensuing controversy over the interpretation of the lander’s results.

What is the nature of the individual, and the ideals of freedom assumed to accompany this individual? In this seminar we explore topics of existentialist philosophy from classical and contemporary sources, such as immersion of experience within time, freedom and potential, and ethics and responsibility. Simultaneously, we will consider the apparent tension between the posits of scientific materialism and existentialist thinking. Particularly, we will be concerned with the question: Can scientific-based reasoning access the deepest convictions that guide our choices?

While so-called analytic approaches to epistemology tend to focus on rigorous linguistic reconstructions of scientific work based on “common sense” and logic, naturalist approaches typically emphasize real-world reconstructions of this work within the constraints placed on scientific reasoning by human cognition and the empirical settings in which this work is produced. The methodological tension between these approaches will serve in this course to motivate a new estimation of the naturalist philosophy of science in this course.

In this seminar, we will consider the extent to which the concepts, methods, and phenomena of the Geisteswissenschaften distinguish them from the natural sciences, and also the status of Geisteswissenschaften as a science among other fields of inquiry. Additionally, we will also consider more generally the role of the Geisteswissenschaften in a democratic society, and what these fields, given their distinctive scientific profiles should promote in such a society.

Identifying and critiquing masculinist distortions of scientifically treated phenomena comprise some of the many contributions of feminist perspectives to contemporary philosophy of science. This seminar will delve into the programmatic upshots of feminist work on liberation and emancipation, with particular focus on attempts to articulate feminist virtues figuring into constructing a naturalist program in philosophy.

The nature of life is not typically treated as an issue of importance during the Scientific Revolution. Nevertheless, the fundamental approaches that came to define theoretical disputes in contemporary professional biology began to take shape during this time. In this seminar, we survey vitalist reactions to Descartes’ thinking on living systems-as-machines through his main corpus, focusing especially on his Discourse.