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Class Detail:

WN 2009
Philosophy
PHIL 602 - Seminar in Philosophy of Science
Section 001

Credits: 3
Advisory Prerequisites: Graduate standing.
Repeatability: May not be repeated for credit.
Primary Instructor: Belot,Gordon

 

(real time availability for all sections)

We will be interested in two modal notions. The first half of the course will be concerned with physical possibility. We will survey the main philosophical accounts of laws of nature: the best-system account (Lewis and others); the universals account (Armstrong–Dretske–Tooley); the primitivist account (Carroll & Maudlin); the necessitarian account (Shoemaker and others); the causal account (Cartwright & Woodward). The second half of the course will be concerned with the notion of geometric possibility. Relationalists about space deny that the parts of space are real existents yet hold that space has a determinate structure. They typically rely on a notion of geometric possibility in explicating claims about spatial structure: e.g., they might say that space is finite in extent if and only if there is a finite upper bound on the size of geometrically possible configurations of matter. Our goal in the second half of the course will be to investigate the extent to which accounts of physical possibility can be adapted to the geometric context in the hopes of finding a satisfactory account of geometric possibility.


Course Syllabi
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Textbooks/Other Materials (data maintained by department in Wolverine Access)

ISBN: 9780822958529 Readings on laws of nature, Author: edited by John W. Carroll., Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press 2004
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