A short analysis of the story of Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, from Canto XXXIII of Dante's "Inferno." It is a story with a deep lesson about the nature of choice and punishment.
Tags: science, philosophy, psychology
Older Episodes
A lecture I gave at the 2019 Nammour Symposium at Sacramento State.
ContraPoints made a video about free speech. It was unfairly flagged and taken down. The irony should not be lost on anyone. ContraPoints: https://www.youtube.com/user/ContraPoints https://twitter.com/ContraPoints
This lecture looks at two accounts of explantion, the causation account and the unification account. After examinging problems with each, I consider the prospect that we can have a pluralistic, context-sensative acount of 'explanation'. That is, what counts as an explanation in one context might not count in another. This …
Should science be in the business of explaning things, or just describing things? Just what is a scientific explanation? This lecture explores these questions, looking first at Carl Hemple's "Covering Law" model of scientific explanation.
One noteable anti-realist argument comes from the 'constructive empiricism' of Bas van Fraassen. I outline the basic idea's behind van Fraassen's theory, and some of the issues with it.
The second key premise of realism is epistemic immodesty, the idea that we can know the Truth about reality. In this video I outline the case against epistemic immodesty, and the realist response thereto.
Expanding on the previous lecture, I try to map out some of the different ways in which one can be a scientific realist, and the problems with those views, according to scientific anti-realists.
This lecture gives a basic run down of scientific realism, the idea that science aims at describing the real world. I revisit the problem of the 'theory ladenness of observation' as an objection to realism, and look at some responses, including Jerry Fodor's argument from "Observation Reconsidered."
Continuing the discussion of naturalism, this lecture explores the 'naturalized epistemology' of W.V.O. Quine, the 'normative naturalism', how naturalism makes sense of values in science, and how it can reconcile science with common sense. It closes with a discussion of how naturalism can draw on Kuhn, Popper and others to …
This lecture beings with a summary of the course so far. A noticeable trend in post-Kuhnian philosophy of science has been the shift towards epistemic relativism. From there, I introduce the idea of naturalism in the philosophy of science, as a way of trying to steer away from that trend, …
In this lecture covers a very cursory approach to radical feminist epistemology, standpoint epistemology, postmodern perspectives on science, science studies, and the so-called 'science wars.' This lecture is woeful incomplete as regards these very complicated topics, but it seemed to me that this series would be incomplete without at least …
In this lecture I do a brief survey of some of feminist perspectives on science, focusing on the ways that gender bias and the exclusion of women from science has been detrimental to both science and society at large.
This video considers Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's "Leviathan and the Air Pump", which examines the rise of empirical science from a sociological perspective.
This video considers the sociology of science, in particular the so-called "Strong Program" of David Bloor.
This video considers the sociology of science, in particular the work of Robert Merton and his analysis of the norms that govern scientific practice.
This video considers objections and problems with Paul Feyerabend's "epistemoloigcal anarchism."
This video covers the 'epistemoloiglcal anarchism' of Paul Feyerabend, who reacts to Thomas Kuhn by saying Kuhn wasn't critical enough on the idea of scientific method. Science works, according to Feyerabend, precicely because there are no rule, there is no method that governs it. The history of science shows us …
In this final video on Imre Lakatos' philosophy of science, I summarize Lakatos' thinking on the relationship between the history of science and philosophy of science. I end with a short aside about Larry Laudan's distinction between pursing and accepting a scientific theory.
In this video I walk through the Imre Lakatos' idea of a 'scientific research program' and how this idea helps us evaluate scientific ideas, understand scientific change, and demarcate science from pseudoscience.