Teaching

The following are some of the courses Marc has taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

PHIL 85: Reason, Religion, and Reality in the Copernican Revolution

Seminar for first-year undergraduates

The reasoning by which Galileo and his contemporaries defended the Copernican model of the solar system (the “heliocentric” model – that is, with the Earth orbiting the Sun rather than the Sun orbiting the Earth) can puzzle us even today. Here are a few of the questions that we could ask about the reasoning given by Copernicus, Galileo, and their contemporaries.

Did Copernicus’s arguments support the heliocentric model strongly enough to justify believing it true?
Or was it unjustified until Galileo amassed telescopic evidence for it?
Or was it unjustified until even later – when Newtonian physics was developed? Or did it remain unjustified until even later – when various mechanical and optical discoveries were made in the nineteenth century?
Was the Catholic Church justified at the time of Galileo in regarding Copernicus’s theory as just one among many fairly successful techniques for predicting the night sky’s appearance? Did Galileo bring his sentence (at his famous – and notorious – trial) on himself?
Could Galileo argue persuasively for his telescope’s reliability?
Could Galileo use mere “thought-experiments” (as opposed to actual experiments) to defend Copernicanism?

In this course, we will grapple with these and related questions in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the logic by which scientific theories in general are tested and, ultimately, justified. We will also try to use this historical episode to understand better how political, social, and cultural factors can influence the reception of a scientific theory – even today! We will learn some of the means by which the biases and presuppositions introduced by these factors were overcome (eventually) in the Copernican Revolution, and we will apply some of these lessons to current science.

At various points during our discussions, each student will submit in written form his or her own best reconstructions of some of the arguments that were given for or against the Copernican model. In other words, each student will offer his or her best advice regarding how a given scientist might have argued for or against Copernicanism, anticipating possible objections and responses. Students will occasionally form groups to examine and to critique one another’s proposals, with each group finally presenting its best thoughts orally to the rest of the class for further discussion. Students will, in effect, be putting Galileo on trial once again – not for heresy or for disobeying authority, but for having convincing or for having insufficient evidence for his Copernicanism.

In all of these ways, students will learn how to appreciate sympathetically the competing astronomical theories from the perspective of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the truth was in some doubt. Along the way, students will wrestle with some of the puzzles and apparent paradoxes arising even from today’s best philosophical accounts of the logic of theory testing in science.

No previous background in science will be assumed. Students will not need to purchase any books.

PHIL 150: Theory, Evidence, and Understanding in Science

The discoveries that scientists make and the methods by which they make them raise a host of interesting philosophical questions, some of which we will explore in this course. These questions included the following:

Are scientific theories distinguished from pseudoscience by being testable against our observations? If so, precisely how is this distinction to be drawn?
By what logic do our observations support or disconfirm various scientific theories?
Can we prove our best scientific theories to be true? Or are they “merely theories”? (Or is this a false choice?)
Are we justified in making predictions about the future on the basis of observations drawn exclusively from the past? If so, why?
What does it mean for one event (for instance, the collision of the Earth with some large rocky body millions of years ago) to be responsible for causing the occurrence of another event (such as the extinction of the dinosaurs) and for explaining why it occurred?
What makes a given regular pattern that we might notice (such as the fact that every piece of copper is electrically conductive) not just a giant coincidence, but a law of nature?
Do the wholesale revolutions in scientific thought that have occasionally occurred (such as the Copernican Revolution in astronomy) amount to rational and inevitable responses to overwhelming evidence? If not, how can they nevertheless be rational?

We will look at these and other questions, settling some of them and trying to make some progress on the others. This course presupposes no background in philosophy or in science, just a willingness to think seriously about the logical foundations of scientific reasoning. The readings consist of short, self-contained bits of philosophy chosen especially for their accessibility to students new to philosophy. The principal written work consists of two short papers (2 pages each), a midterm, and an open-book final exam.

IDST 120: Myths, Moons, and Methods: Changing Worldviews in Astronomy

III course, taught with Fabian Heitsch (Physics) and James Rives (Classics)

Astronomy is one of the oldest global enterprises of humanity. This course will focus on astronomy as it developed in the ancient Mediterranean and in early modern Europe, taking students on a voyage through time — from astronomy’s early beginnings as a means to keep calendars and as the underpinnings of mythology, to its central role during the early modern period in the development of natural sciences as we understand them today. The logical, epistemological, and conceptual foundations of early modern astronomy became the model for all future scientific research. Since astronomy lives at the intersection of mythology and language, philosophy, and natural sciences, students will encounter research methods specific to each of the three subjects. Students will acquire the logical, quantitative, and analytic skills necessary for understanding how different epochs interpreted the generation of knowledge; how their interpretations were influenced by their culture, mythology, and religion; and how science arrives at knowledge even when the empirical evidence is logically compatible with many rival theories.

PHIL 351: Philosophy of Physics

A theory in physics (such as Newton’s theory of motion and gravity, or Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism, or Einstein’s special theory of relativity, or quantum mechanics) may succeed in making a bunch of accurate predictions regarding our observations. But then the theory must be interpreted: we must try to understand what the theory says the world is really like, in view of the theory’s accuracy in predicting our observations. This task leads to a host of classic metaphysical problems, some of which we will examine in this course.

Problems we may take up include Zeno’s paradoxes, the meaning of instantaneous velocity, whether a cause must be local in space and time to its effect, whether electric and magnetic fields are real entities on a par with matter, whether the universe is deterministic, whether the universe’s fundamental properties are dispositions, what it would mean for space to be “relational” (as Leibniz thought) or “absolute” (as Newton thought), what sort of thing is energy, what it means to say that mass and energy are “equivalent” (as Einstein’s special theory of relativity says), whether there are “spooky” actions at a distance (as quantum mechanics seems to suggest), and so forth.

No specific background in physics is presupposed (though students who know some physics may find their background convenient). Equations from physics will occasionally appear, of course, but we will work through them carefully together. There will be some homework exercises (some regurgitative, others asking for creativity) as well as exams. A major emphasis in the course will be to demonstrate the lack of any sharp boundary between scientific and philosophical questions in interpreting theories in physics.

PHIL 352: Sex and Death, Life and Health, Species and Evolution

PHIL 352: Sex and Death, Life and Health, Species and Evolution – The Philosophy of Biology

This course will explore some issues concerning the conceptual foundations of contemporary biology.
Topics will include the following:

What makes something qualify as a living thing? What would it take for the concept of “life” to do any work in contemporary biology? Can a piece of computer software be (literally) alive?
What does it take for something to qualify as an organism rather than as a collection of distinct organisms or as a piece of a larger organism? Examples for us to think about: lichens, ant colonies, siphonophores, a field of dandelions, you.
What is Darwinian “fitness”? Do fitness differences cause or explain frequencies of traits in populations? How does random drift explain a result? Is Darwin’s theory of natural selection captured by some set of claims? How is that theory confirmed or disconfirmed?
What does it mean to say that the function of the heart is to pump the blood (rather than to make lub-dub sounds)? Are there no biological functions if there is no Designer? What is the relation between malfunctions and diseases?
What makes it the case that two organisms belong to the same biological species? Are biological species natural kinds, like the chemical elements, or more like the constellations in astronomy: convenient categories for us to use but lacking objective reality?

No particular background knowledge of philosophy or of biology is presupposed (beyond a rough recollection of high-school level ideas about evolution). But some prior experience in writing philosophy papers and thinking philosophically would definitely be helpful. Readings will be drawn from literature in philosophy and biology (and perhaps computer science). Short writing assignments (2-4 pages long) will be assigned over the course of the semester, asking you to make some small but original philosophical point in response to the reading. There will also be a final exam and perhaps an occasional worksheet.

Prerequisite: 1 previous PHIL course

PHIL 357: Induction, Probability, and Confirmation

PHIL 428: History of American Philosophy

The influence of the mid-20^th-century American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars has continued to grow in recent years. This course will focus on some of his most famous essays and some of the most notable work by others that they inspired.

We will read closely large parts (at least) of his essays “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM), “Some Reflections on Language Games”, “Abstract Entities”, “Phenomenalism”, “The Language of Theories”, “Is Scientific Realism Tenable?”, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man”, and perhaps others. (Of course, there are many other essays by Sellars that we will not examine.) Time permitting, we will also read some essays prompted by his work, including probably (at least pieces of) essays by Robert Brandom, Paul Churchland, John McDowell, Richard Rorty, Bas van Fraassen, and Michael Williams.

Topics likely to be taken up (though the students enrolling in this course are not expected to know anything already about the topics that I about to mention!) include the Myth of the Given, foundationalist empiricist epistemology, how things look, the Manifest Image and the Scientific Image, conceptual content, modality, scientific realism, phenomenalism, laws of nature, the mental, the space of reasons, nominalism and semantic discourse, reference, truth, rules and norms, and scientific explanation. No particular prior background knowledge of these or other related philosophical topics will be assumed. The course lectures (and readings, in some cases) will have to supply the philosophical background needed to appreciate Sellars’s work. The course is intended to be useful both for those with no prior acquaintance with its topics and for those with some relevant background knowledge.

We will have to work s-l-o-w-l-y through Sellars’s papers (especially through his most famous essay, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, to which we will devote a lot of time). So the course is not recommended for those who tend to become impatient with that kind of unhurried pace and with close reading of individual sentences and paragraphs. But Sellars’s work rewards close attention and that is what I will be trying to give it. These close readings will occasionally lead us on tangents that allow us to explore other regions of 20th-century American philosophy.

Writing required of undergraduates will consist of periodic short essays asking the student to unpack some paragraph of Sellars’s (or someone else’s) writing that we have discussed in class—along with a take-home final. These periodic essays are intended to make sure that the students are keeping up with the material. Graduate students taking the course for regular credit can choose to write a term paper or instead to write all but one of the periodic short essays. Graduate students taking the course for non-writing credit have to write any two of the periodic short essays.

PHIL 450: Philosophy of Natural Sciences

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PHIL 450: Philosophy of Natural Sciences

This course will survey several core topics in the philosophy of science and will feature some classic readings on these topics. Although I will be responsible for lecturing through a good part of the material, I hope that there will be some lively class discussions as well. The course presupposes no background in the philosophy of science in particular, though undergraduates must have already completed at least two previous philosophy courses. Topics to be discussed include logical empiricism, the logic underlying the way in which scientific theories are confirmed by evidence, the nature of scientific explanations, causal relations, laws of nature, objective chances, scientific realism and anti-realism, and the unity of science. Readings will include classic pieces by Hempel, Hume, Goodman, Reichenbach, Duhem, Salmon, Earman, Sober, van Fraassen, Lewis, Dretske, Cartwright, Sellars, and Fodor. Both undergraduates and graduate students will have to take the final exam. In addition, undergraduates will be assigned after each class a question concerning the material that we discussed in that class. The question is to be answered (in 1-2 pages) before the next week’s class. The question will not require knowledge beyond what we already discussed in class; it is intended to test for basic comprehension. Graduate students will have three short writing exercises over the course of the semester. There is no term paper for graduate students. All of the course readings will be made available on Sakai. Graduate students taking the course under the Department’s “participation-only” option need only write one of the three short writing exercises; they can select which one to do.

PHIL 459: Philosophy of Mathematics

Ever since there has been philosophy, mathematics has been recognized as raising deep philosophical questions. (Purportedly, Thales was both the first philosopher and the first mathematician.) These questions include the following:

Are some mathematical claims true and, if so, what makes them true?
How do we know mathematics – including (a) is it knowable a priori and, if so, how do we manage to gain epistemic access to mathematical facts that way, and (b) what is the role of reasoning falling short of proof in mathematics?
What is the relationship between logic and mathematics?
Are mathematical truths necessary and independent of the mind?
What makes mathematical truths applicable to the empirical world and what is the relation of mathematics to science?

Many of these questions acquired particular urgency in the late nineteenth century as imaginary numbers and new geometries were discovered and as there was greater concern to place mathematics on a rigorous, true, and certain foundation.

This course will examine some of these questions and some notable attempts to answer them. It is a survey course and presupposes no previous acquaintance with the philosophy of mathematics. (It starts from scratch and so it may – at least in places – be too elementary for some interested students. On the other hand, that I will take the responsibility for filling in all of the requisite background may enable the course to work well for some students with minimal relevant background.)

This course will include a survey of a few famous “-isms” in the philosophy of math, such as (though probably not including all of) Platonism, Logicism, Intuitionism, Formalism, Conventionalism, Empiricism, Nominalism, Structuralism and Fictionalism. This course will also engage with some topics in the philosophy of mathematical practice, such as the variety and virtues of various kinds of mathematical proofs, the nature of explanation and notation in mathematics, and the role and power of non-deductive reasoning in mathematics.

This course is intended to be useful to both some undergraduates and some graduate students, but the written work expected will differ for the two groups of students.

Written work for graduate students consists of the usual thing: a term paper of 15-25 pages on some topic of the student’s choice that makes direct contact with material discussed in the course.

Written work for undergraduate students consists of (i) a final term paper (in lieu of a final exam) of no more than 12 pages (typed, double-spaced, 8 ½ x 11 inch paper, 12-point type) due at the time at which the Registrar has set the final exam for the course, on one of the topics I will set; (ii) a brief oral presentation of the term paper during the period that the Registrar has set aside for the final exam; and (iii) two “midterm” exams (take-home, open-note) each consisting of several questions (each requiring a 1-2 pp. answer) occurring about 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through the semester.

Teaching

PHIL 85: Reason, Religion, and Reality in the Copernican Revolution

Hier ist ein warum.