Who we are and what we do is all tangled up in our identity. This subject considers how identities are constructed and maintained through mediated processes of self and other. The subject investigates the myriad demands and devices that figure in constructing our senses of self and other (including language, leisure, beliefs and embodied practices). By exploring identity in diverse contexts, across time and place, the subject maps varying conceptions of self and other and how these conceptions are constructed and maintained. A key focus is on how these mediated conceptions of self and other are translated into material practices of inclusion, exclusion, discrimination, violence and criminalisation.

Language plays a central role in the central disciplinary areas in the humanities and social sciences. This subject gives students tools for thinking about language in a range of disciplines, including linguistics, history, sociology, politics, literary studies, anthropology, language studies, psychology and psychoanalytic theory. It shows how language can be analysed as a system, but also how language features centrally in politcal and social contexts: for example, in the processing of the claims of asylum seekers, in developing views of ethnicity, race and nation, and in colonialism; and in the construction of gendered and sexual identity. The role of language in the psyche, and the process of acquisition of languages in children and in adults, are also important topics. Knowing how to think about language, and familiarity with the main thinkers who have discussed language in a range of humanities and social science disciplines, provide an indispensable basis for study in any area of the Arts degree.

The idea of power is a way to grasp the character of social relations. Investigating power can tell us about who is in control and who may benefit from such arrangements. Power can be a zero-sum game of domination. It can also be about people acting together to enact freedom. This subject examines the diverse and subtle ways power may be exercised. It considers how power operates in different domains such as markets, political systems and other social contexts. It also examines how power may be moderated by such things as regulation and human rights. A key aim is to explore how differing perspectives portray power relations and how issues of power distribution may be characterised and addressed.

Reason, many believe, is what makes us human. Until recently, most scientists and philosophers agreed that the ability to use the mind to analyse and interpret the world is something intrinsic to the nature of our species. Reason has a long and extraordinary history. We will explore a number of inter-related themes: the nature of reason from Ancient Greece to our contemporary world; the ever shifting relationship between reason and faith; reason's place in the development of scientific experimentation and thinking; shifting perspectives about the uses of Reason and, finally, how reason relates to theories of the mind, exploring the tensions between reason, the passions and the will.

Reason will take you on a journey from Plato's cave to the neuro-scientists' lab. We will visit revolutions in science, thinking and politics. We will explore the impact of some of the great philosophers of history, including Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Bentham, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, Foucault and many more besides. By the end of this subject you will have a deep understanding of the importance of the idea of reason to human history and philosophy. You might, even, be able to answer the question: 'does reason exist?'

Reason is an Arts Foundation Subject and we will argue that understanding the history and philosophy of reason provides great insights into many aspects of the humanities from political philosophy to understanding history. We will, of course, be paying particular attention to the foundational skills that will help you successfully complete your Arts major: particularly critical thinking and argument development.

This subject will provide students with an introduction to the complexity, challenges and richness of Australian Indigenous life and cultures. Drawing on a wide range of diverse and dynamic guest lecturers, this subject gives students an opportunity to encounter Australian Indigenous knowledges, histories and experiences through interdisciplinary perspectives. Across three thematic blocks - Indigenous Knowledges, Social and Political Contexts and Representation/Self-Representation - this subject engages contemporary cultural and intellectual debate. Social and political contexts will be considered through engagement with specific issues and a focus on Indigenous cultural forms, which may include literature, music, fine arts, museum exhibitions and performance, will allow students to consider self-representation as a means by which to disrupt and expand perceptions of Aboriginality.

Humans grapple with representations of themselves and their contexts. They also like to imagine other possible worlds. We use words, language, images, sounds and movement to construct narratives and stories, large and small, about the trivial and the profound, the past and the future. These representations can help us to understand worlds but they can also create worlds for us. This subject explores how different genres such as speech, writing, translation, film, theatre and art generate representations of social life, imagination and the human condition. A key aim of the subject is to develop a critical appreciation of how language, images and embodied gestures are used to construct empowering and disempowering discourses.

What is science? When is an idea or a theory scientific? These seemingly abstract questions often generate controversy when applied to contentious topics: whether climate change can be attributed to human activities, whether vaccinces can cause autism, or whether astrology works. In these controversies questions of scientific authority become associated with discussions on how much trust we should place on scientific evidence.

The subject will study the debate about the demarcation of science from pseudoscience and from other forms of knowledge. It will also look at the way science is demarcated in practice - both within science and in the wider public. We will do so by looking at various case studies, ranging from Darwinian evolution and string theory to acupuncture, creationism and climate change skepticism. The subject will introduce students to current approaches both in philosophy and in sociology of science.

In this subject, we embark on a fascinating journey through the history of Western science, exploring changing ideas about the physical world beginning with the birth of natural philosophy in ancient Greece in the sixth century BC until the present day. The subject traces the dominance of Aristotle’s cosmology in the ancient and medieval world, and its subsequent demise during the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We then turn our attention to the emergence of a quantitative and experimental scientific culture that gradually took shape during the Enlightenment, before concluding with a brief look at Albert Einstein’s revolutionary new ideas of light and gravity. We cover topics such as Renaissance humanism, different theories of matter from the middle ages to the nineteenth century; the shift from the earth-centred to the sun-centred universe; Isaac Newton’s influence on the science of the eighteenth century; the search for the unity of forces in nature; and different explanations of the nature of gravity throughout history. This subject offers students a wide-ranging introduction to the history of science and a deeper appreciation of the way in which it has been shaped by social, political and cultural movements.

The university is not just a place to learn facts, it is also a place of argument, where ideas are contested. In this subject students will attend debates conducted by academics arguing about some of the most important issues in contemporary science and society. The subject places scientific debate in the context of current social and cultural issues, and illustrates how current social and cultural thinking is shaped by scientific controversy. Each week we will take up a contentious issue, and students will hear a lecture clearly arguing for one position, followed by a lecture clearly arguing for a different position. In each case your lecturers will do their best to persuade you of their position. The challenge for students in the tutorials and assessment tasks is to judge what is at issue, weigh the evidence, and determine which case is strongest.

Weekly debates will be selected from among the following controversial propositions:

1. Genetically modified crops are the only way to feed the masses.
2. Nuclear fuel is the future of energy production.
3. Science and technology is the path to utopia.
4. Humans will become Post-human.
5. The scientific method is the only way to truly know.
6. Catastrophic climate change can be averted.
7. There is a physical explanation for everything that exists and everything that happens.
8. Digital media is making us stupid.
9. A machine more intelligent than you will exist in your lifetime.
10. Our history is fundamentally shaped by science and technology.
11. This has been a waste of time: controversies cannot be resolved through rational debate.

In many cultures the study of celestial phenomena has taken a central role in the attempts to understand the world they lived in. The apparent regularity of sun, moon and stars enabled observers to formulate rules for the behaviour of celestial bodies and infer various conclusions from these rules, ranging from cosmological models to astrological predictions. The subject will study how astronomical knowledge has developed throughout the world. It combines simple astronomical observations and study of historical instruments with classes discussing the development of astronomy in different cultures ranging from East Asia via the Middle East and Europe to Central America and Australia.

Central questions will be: How were the same phenomena interpreted in different cultures? How were astronomical observations done? What political and religious functions did astronomy have? How was astronomical knowledge transmitted between different cultures? Why did early modern Europe become the place that developed the idea of modern science and how did other civilisations react to the astronomical developments in Europe? The subject will thus give an overview of the origins of our modern world view while offering reflections on cross-cultural studies of science.

This subject discusses central topics in human understandings about their environment in the Western world, particularly over the last 500 years. As Europeans began to venture out of their continent in the 15th century, they discovered new environments that challenged their received wisdom about themselves and their relationship to nature. Modern Science with the inherent idea of a mastery over nature is an outcome of this process. We will trace how in this history different interpretations of 'nature' have shaped science and have been shaped by science in return, including topics such as taxonomy, gardening, theories of life, and the rise of environmentalism. This subject should be of interest to students who would like to learn more about the origins of the environmental sciences, the dominance of scientific understandings of nature, and our ongoing attempts to live within a changing environment.

In this subject students will study a variety of contemporary and future technologies, and will examine the implications of these technologies for society, and for daily life. Topics covered include techno-utopian and dystopian visions; ethics and biomedical technologies; cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborgs and other 'cybers'; social networking systems; artificial intelligence; technology and crime; virtual reality; technology and the economy; privacy and surveillance; and technology and contemporary media. Students will participate in the theoretical work, supported by many examples and 'hands-on' experience. Students who successfully complete this subject will be able to critically analyse and evaluate controversial issues relating to technology in the social context, and argue credible positions in relation to these controversies.

Recent popular debates over the relationship between science and religion have too often denegrated into shouted polemics between religious fundamentalists and new atheists. Yet many of the really important historical, philosophical and theological questions call for more careful scholarly attention. This subject examines the complex relationship between religion and the natural sciences. Historically, religious concerns guided the science of Kepler, Newton and many other pioneers of the Scientific Revolution. For them, studying the universe demonstrated the attributes of God. This view was eventually replaced by radically different ones: to some science and religion are necessarily antagonistic, to others they belong to separate realms, while others still see a mutually illuminating consonance between the two. We examine this shift, the reasoning (good and bad) behind it and its residues, and the way these views have shaped contemporary debates over God and the natural sciences. In the second half of the subject, we explore some of the metaphysical, theological and existential questions arising from Darwinian evolutionary and modern cosmology, before offering some final reflections on the relationship between the 'personal God' of religious experience and the 'philosophers God' posited to explain facts about the natural world.

The publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859), is regarded as one of the most monumental events in the history of science. At a swoop, Darwin transformed our understanding of the relationship between life and the environment, while at the same time putting forward a solution to "the mystery of mysteries" of how species came into being. His "dangerous idea", of evolution through natural selection, challenged the dominant theological view of creation and ushered in an era where material superseded religious explanations for the existence of life on earth.

This subject explores the Darwinian scientific revolution by getting students to play a game: Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal and the Rise of Scientific Naturalism. The game is set in the Royal Society of London, the most important scientific body in Britain. Every year the Society awarded the Copley Medal to a front-rank scientist for extending the boundaries of scientific knowledge. It was one of the most prestigious awards a man of science could receive! The question was: should Darwin be awarded the Copley? If the Society decided he should, then it could be seen as legitimising his controversial theory; and if it decided against recognising Darwin's work, it might be portrayed as a bastion of conservatism resisting scientific innovation. The stakes were high and the forces of tradition were ranged against those of modernisation. The game enacts this debate and the forces that shaped it.

Students are allocated a specific role, which they research and perform over the semester. Each week a particular topic relating to science, society and Darwinism is discussed and debated in the Royal Society's chambers at Burlington House: the relationship between science and religion; the philosophical foundations of good science; race and slavery; the role of women in science and society; and the extent to which the state (and the Royal Society) should intervene in social affairs.The pro- and anti-Darwinians battle it out for the hearts and minds of undecided members of the Society's Council, culminating in a final session where a vote is taken about whether to award Darwin the Copley or not. Between the first and final meetings, students meet and plot in an effort to achieve their individual victory objectives.

Unlike traditional teaching methods, this model provides students with an active, immersive and fun way of deepening their understanding of one of science's most profound ideas, while developing key research and presentation skills.

Does science provide a true integrated representation of the world, or simply a plurality of incommensurable frameworks for investigating it? What’s distinctive of the scientific method, and what’s the rational justification for taking its results at face value? This subject will address these central questions by exploring some of the major theoretical developments in the philosophy of science over the last seventy years.

In part one of the subject we will explore competing theories about the nature and justification of the scientific method. We will consider the traditional view that the method is inductive, as well as Karl Popper’s suggestion that the method of science is to test and falsify theories. We will also consider problems with the empirical basis of science, such as the theory-dependence of observation and the underdetermination of theory by data.

In part two we will consider the more recent historical turn in the philosophy of science which proposes models of scientific theory change rather than a theory of scientific method. Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory that science is characterized by a series of revolutionary transitions between paradigms will be critically examined. In addition, we will consider Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchist theory that the only universal rule of method for science is “anything goes”. We will also explore Imre Lakatos’s attempt to respond to Kuhn and Feyerabend by proposing that scientists are able to rationally choose between progressive and non-progressive research programmes.

In part three we will ask whether the historical approach to the philosophy of science yields an adequate account of scientific progress. Do the historical approaches have the resources to show that science makes continuous progress toward the objective truth about the natural world? This question leads into the debate between scientific realist and anti-realist interpretations of scientific knowledge. Here we will ask whether scientific theories provide a true representation of the way the world is at both the observable and the unobservable level? Or should we instead think of science as providing us with theories that are merely empirically adequate, in the sense that they can account for experimental data?

The subject will study the early history of electricity by reenacting the historical setting of original experiments. We will act as an 18th century scientific society trying to reproduce phenomena discovered elsewhere. We will use role playing elements to gain a better understanding of the early development of electricity, its cultural context and its political significance.

The study of electricity began in the eighteenth century in an unusual way, as public spectacle - electrical experiments were carried out in the salons, public houses and during town festivals with many members of the public participating. However, what started as entertainment soon raised serious questions as to what electricity was and how it related to other natural phenomena. Debates around electricity also were linked to enlightenment ideas of equality, American independence, the French Revolution and the romantic fantasies of Dr Frankenstein.

Science provides innumerable benefits in our lives but poses just as many urgent questions. The aim of this subject is to explore the role of science in our society by drawing on recent scholarly work in sociology and philosophy of science. The first part of the course will introduce several conceptions of scientific knowledge, and of the role of scientists and their knowledge in society. The second part of the course will apply these intellectual tools to some of the pressing questions about contemporary science. What is the relationship between science, technology and the market? To what extend should science be directed by values? What role do or should scientists play in policy decisions? What role should ‘the public’ play in setting research priorities? What is a scientific expert? Why do we disagree about climate change? Has science shown that race is a social construct?

The subject follows the intellectual history of early modern Europe in a global political and economic context. It looks at the way European encounters with other parts of the world and the subsequent colonial enterprise produced changes to the intellectual formation of Europe. It will also study how new conceptions of knowledge - about nature, about humans, and about God - were interwoven with social and political developments. In particularly, it will discuss how the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and the emergence of a world view based on reason related to earlier ideas of natural magic. Topics will include Renaissance humanism and practical science, the Protestant reformations, demonology and witchcraft, the Columbian exchange and colonial trade, slavery, new natural philosophy and the mathematisation of nature, the emergence of the experimental method, science and early modern state formation, Newtonianism and the radical enlightenment, enlightenment science and colonial empires.

Note: This subject is jointly taught by the History and History and Philosophy of Science disciplines and is an elective in both majors.

In England, between 1750 and 1914, scientific testimony increasingly became a feature of the law. In particular, the scope given to the expert witness shaped the development of the common law. The forensic sciences, in general, became a tool for identifying the criminal, while forensic psychiatry, in particular, was integral to developing new notions of criminal culpability and responsibility. In the process, society's understanding of both crime and the criminal was significantly modified by the emergence of these new sciences.

This subject will focus on the remarkable record-set that has been provided by the digitisation of the Old Bailey Session Papers (OBSP). As London's Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey was the predominant theatre of crime and punishment in the largest city in the world. The OBSP provides transcripts of the trials which offer extraordinary insights into the workings of the law and the past lives of the long dead historical actors. At the same time, they allow us to chart the transformations wrought upon law and society by the emergence of the forensic sciences.

Madness, insanity, lunacy, losing one’s mind, nervous breakdown, psychosis, neurosis; some of the myriad terms that have been used to describe what happens when a person is deemed to no longer have control over word, thought or deed. It is one of the most baffling of phenomena and has been for millennia.

“Minds and Madness” explores the terms using lenses provided by history and philosophy. We focus on a number of inter-related questions:

• whether mental illnesses are natural kinds (i.e. are they real and if so what is the nature of their reality)?
• how have underlying theories of cause and pathology created specific therapeutic measures?
• and what has been the relationship between the psych-sciences and power (focusing upon patients, practitioners, and the intersections of ethnicity, class and gender)?

A flavour of the subject is captured by the people, events and therapies we explore: Burton, Descartes and Locke; asylums, mental hospitals and therapeutic communities; psychosurgery, electro-convulsive therapy, psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry and psychopharmacology; the major contemporary disease-categories (schizophrenia, bi-polar &c.) and disease-categories that have morphed or disappeared (fugue, melancholia, hysteria). We explore the history of classification systems (e.g. the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) and the different disciplines that have produced them (psychiatry, psychology and neurology). By the end of the subject students should have a profound understanding of the nature of the psych-sciences and the people and conditions they have sought to understand and treat.

“Minds and Madness” is a blended-learning subject. Lectures are provided online as weekly modules. They combine text, images, links, video and extensive bibliographies. Students are asked to explore these, addressing the questions raised in the modules. They also attend a two-hour workshop where the major issues are explored, while ideas and assessments are workshopped. It is a subject that will appeal to anyone who has an interest in psychiatry, psychology, the neurosciences, and history and philosophy more generally.

We are often told modern science rests on two central pillars – observation and theory. But science involves more than just observing and theorizing. It encompasses a host of other activities, from drawing diagrams to building models to running computer simulations. Moreover, observation itself is a complex and messy business, which often involves a certain amount of theorizing and technical skill and varies greatly across different fields. The astronomer who makes telescopic observations of the night sky practices a very different craft to the ecologist who studies the behavior of primates in their natural habitat. A molecular biologist who studies a new strain of virus using an electron microscope engages in a different form of observation to an archaeologist who inspects an excavation site to find clues to a lost civilization. In this subject, we go beyond simple labels such as ‘observation’ and ‘theory’ in exploring the recent “turn to practice” in the history and philosophy of science. By reframing traditional questions in terms of ‘what scientists do’ rather than ‘what scientists believe’, students will gain a deeper understanding of how different forms of inquiry involving the hand, the mind and the eye actually generate scientific knowledge.

In many cultures the study of celestial phenomena has taken a central role in the attempts to understand the world they lived in. The apparent regularity of sun, moon and stars enabled observers to formulate rules for the behaviour of celestial bodies and infer various conclusions from these rules, ranging from cosmological models to astrological predictions. The subject will study how astronomical knowledge has developed throughout the world. It combines simple astronomical observations and study of historical instruments with classes discussing the development of astronomy in different cultures ranging from East Asia via the Middle East and Europe to Central America and Australia.

Central questions will be: How were the same phenomena interpreted in different cultures? How were astronomical observations done? What political and religious functions did astronomy have? How was astronomical knowledge transmitted between different cultures? Why did early modern Europe become the place that developed the idea of modern science and how did other civilisations react to the astronomical developments in Europe? The subject will thus give an overview of the origins of our modern world view while offering reflections on cross-cultural studies of science.

This subject discusses central topics in human understandings about their environment in the Western world, particularly over the last 500 years. As Europeans began to venture out of their continent in the 15th century, they discovered new environments that challenged their received wisdom about themselves and their relationship to nature. Modern Science with the inherent idea of a mastery over nature is an outcome of this process. We will trace how in this history different interpretations of 'nature' have shaped science and have been shaped by science in return, including topics such as taxonomy, gardening, theories of life, and the rise of environmentalism. This subject should be of interest to students who would like to learn more about the origins of the environmental sciences, the dominance of scientific understandings of nature, and our ongoing attempts to live within a changing environment.

In this subject students will study a variety of contemporary and future technologies, and will examine the implications of these technologies for society, and for daily life. Topics covered include techno-utopian and dystopian visions; ethics and biomedical technologies; cybernetics, cyberspace, cyborgs and other 'cybers'; social networking systems; artificial intelligence; technology and crime; virtual reality; technology and the economy; privacy and surveillance; and technology and contemporary media. Students will participate in the theoretical work, supported by many examples and 'hands-on' experience. Students who successfully complete this subject will be able to critically analyse and evaluate controversial issues relating to technology in the social context, and argue credible positions in relation to these controversies.

Recent popular debates over the relationship between science and religion have too often denegrated into shouted polemics between religious fundamentalists and new atheists. Yet many of the really important historical, philosophical and theological questions call for more careful scholarly attention. This subject examines the complex relationship between religion and the natural sciences. Historically, religious concerns guided the science of Kepler, Newton and many other pioneers of the Scientific Revolution. For them, studying the universe demonstrated the attributes of God. This view was eventually replaced by radically different ones: to some science and religion are necessarily antagonistic, to others they belong to separate realms, while others still see a mutually illuminating consonance between the two. We examine this shift, the reasoning (good and bad) behind it and its residues, and the way these views have shaped contemporary debates over God and the natural sciences. In the second half of the subject, we explore some of the metaphysical, theological and existential questions arising from Darwinian evolutionary and modern cosmology, before offering some final reflections on the relationship between the 'personal God' of religious experience and the 'philosophers God' posited to explain facts about the natural world.

Neuroscience, cognitive science, and computer science are making huge strides in modeling the human brain’s information processing systems, from visual discrimination of faces to the neural circuitry and hormones that control our emotional reactions. But can these disciplines fully explain all aspects of our minds? Can scientific theories explain what it’s like to smell the sea or to taste durian? Can they capture your appreciation of the meaning of a Shakespeare sonnet or the emotional significance of your favorite hip hop song? These questions continue to be hotly contested by both philosophers and scientists. Everyone agrees that human brain states are reliably correlated with our mental states – but are these mental states strictly identical to brain states or just causally produced by them? And just which aspects of our brains are correlated with states like beliefs, desires, emotions or sensations?

In this subject, we examine the most influential philosophical answers to these questions. We start with Descartes’ argument for dualism, which he claims provides indubitable grounds for thinking one’s mind is not identical to any physical object. We then consider why scientifically minded philosophers resisted this picture and their attempts to say exactly which aspects of the physical world constitute a mental state. Is a mind just a disposition to behave in intelligent ways? Is it a functioning human brain? Is it like a computer program? Should our ordinary conception of mental states be rejected as scientifically ill-founded? Is it immune to scientific refutation? In the second half of the semester, we’ll look in more detail at three particular problem cases: (i) the ‘what it’s like’ aspect of our sensory experiences, (ii) our understanding of the contents of our words and thoughts, and (iii) the unity of our own conscious mental lives.

The publication of On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (1859), is regarded as one of the most monumental events in the history of science. At a swoop, Darwin transformed our understanding of the relationship between life and the environment, while at the same time putting forward a solution to "the mystery of mysteries" of how species came into being. His "dangerous idea", of evolution through natural selection, challenged the dominant theological view of creation and ushered in an era where material superseded religious explanations for the existence of life on earth.

This subject explores the Darwinian scientific revolution by getting students to play a game: Charles Darwin, the Copley Medal and the Rise of Scientific Naturalism. The game is set in the Royal Society of London, the most important scientific body in Britain. Every year the Society awarded the Copley Medal to a front-rank scientist for extending the boundaries of scientific knowledge. It was one of the most prestigious awards a man of science could receive! The question was: should Darwin be awarded the Copley? If the Society decided he should, then it could be seen as legitimising his controversial theory; and if it decided against recognising Darwin's work, it might be portrayed as a bastion of conservatism resisting scientific innovation. The stakes were high and the forces of tradition were ranged against those of modernisation. The game enacts this debate and the forces that shaped it.

Students are allocated a specific role, which they research and perform over the semester. Each week a particular topic relating to science, society and Darwinism is discussed and debated in the Royal Society's chambers at Burlington House: the relationship between science and religion; the philosophical foundations of good science; race and slavery; the role of women in science and society; and the extent to which the state (and the Royal Society) should intervene in social affairs.The pro- and anti-Darwinians battle it out for the hearts and minds of undecided members of the Society's Council, culminating in a final session where a vote is taken about whether to award Darwin the Copley or not. Between the first and final meetings, students meet and plot in an effort to achieve their individual victory objectives.

Unlike traditional teaching methods, this model provides students with an active, immersive and fun way of deepening their understanding of one of science's most profound ideas, while developing key research and presentation skills.

The subject will study the early history of electricity by reenacting the historical setting of original experiments. We will act as an 18th century scientific society trying to reproduce phenomena discovered elsewhere. We will use role playing elements to gain a better understanding of the early development of electricity, its cultural context and its political significance.

The study of electricity began in the eighteenth century in an unusual way, as public spectacle - electrical experiments were carried out in the salons, public houses and during town festivals with many members of the public participating. However, what started as entertainment soon raised serious questions as to what electricity was and how it related to other natural phenomena. Debates around electricity also were linked to enlightenment ideas of equality, American independence, the French Revolution and the romantic fantasies of Dr Frankenstein.

Does science provide a true integrated representation of the world, or simply a plurality of incommensurable frameworks for investigating it? What’s distinctive of the scientific method, and what’s the rational justification for taking its results at face value? This subject will address these central questions by exploring some of the major theoretical developments in the philosophy of science over the last seventy years.

In part one of the subject we will explore competing theories about the nature and justification of the scientific method. We will consider the traditional view that the method is inductive, as well as Karl Popper’s suggestion that the method of science is to test and falsify theories. We will also consider problems with the empirical basis of science, such as the theory-dependence of observation and the underdetermination of theory by data.

In part two we will consider the more recent historical turn in the philosophy of science which proposes models of scientific theory change rather than a theory of scientific method. Thomas S. Kuhn’s theory that science is characterized by a series of revolutionary transitions between paradigms will be critically examined. In addition, we will consider Paul Feyerabend’s epistemological anarchist theory that the only universal rule of method for science is “anything goes”. We will also explore Imre Lakatos’s attempt to respond to Kuhn and Feyerabend by proposing that scientists are able to rationally choose between progressive and non-progressive research programmes.

In part three we will ask whether the historical approach to the philosophy of science yields an adequate account of scientific progress. Do the historical approaches have the resources to show that science makes continuous progress toward the objective truth about the natural world? This question leads into the debate between scientific realist and anti-realist interpretations of scientific knowledge. Here we will ask whether scientific theories provide a true representation of the way the world is at both the observable and the unobservable level? Or should we instead think of science as providing us with theories that are merely empirically adequate, in the sense that they can account for experimental data?

Meaning is central to many issues in philosophy. The idea that the meaning of complex representation depends on the meanings of its parts is fundamental to the way we understand the mind, language, and logic. In this subject, we look at the different ways that this idea has been understood and applied throughout the 20th Century and into the present day.

In the first part of the subject, our focus is on the concepts of necessity and possibility, and the way that ‘possible worlds semantics’ has been used in theories of meaning. We will focus on the logic of necessity and possibility (modal logic), times (temporal logic), conditionality and dependence (counterfactuals), and the notions of analyticity and a priority, which are central to much philosophy.

In the second part of the subject, we will examine closely the assumption that every statement we make is either true or false but not both. We will examine the paradoxes of truth (like the so-called ‘liar paradox’) and vagueness (the ‘sorites paradox’), and we will investigate different ways attempts at resolving these paradoxes by going beyond our traditional views of truth (using ‘many valued logics’) or by defending the traditional perspective.

The subject serves as an introduction to ways that logic is applied in the study of language, epistemology and metaphysics, so it is useful to those who already know some philosophy and would like to see how logic relates to those issues. It is also useful to those who already know some logic and would like to learn new logical techniques and see how these techniques can be applied.

Biological sex is both fundamental to reproduction and, in humans, the basis of the primary social category of gender, making it both an important and politically charged variable in scientific research across the biological and social sciences. In this subject, students will explore fundamental and controversial questions at the intersection of sex and science, and consider their wider social implications, as well as for science. The subject will tackle questions including:

• What is biological sex? Is it stable, fixed and binary?
• How do cultural assumptions about sex influence scientific questions, methods, analysis and interpretation: from genetics and endocrinology to neuroscience and evolutionary science?
• What does science tell us about how to think about the relations between sex and gender? What are the social and political implications of different accounts?
• What is the impact of scientific claims about sex in society? What should they be?

Students will encounter varied disciplinary perspectives on sex, and critically examine both academic and popular resources.

Science provides innumerable benefits in our lives but poses just as many urgent questions. The aim of this subject is to explore the role of science in our society by drawing on recent scholarly work in sociology and philosophy of science. The first part of the course will introduce several conceptions of scientific knowledge, and of the role of scientists and their knowledge in society. The second part of the course will apply these intellectual tools to some of the pressing questions about contemporary science. What is the relationship between science, technology and the market? To what extend should science be directed by values? What role do or should scientists play in policy decisions? What role should ‘the public’ play in setting research priorities? What is a scientific expert? Why do we disagree about climate change? Has science shown that race is a social construct?

The subject follows the intellectual history of early modern Europe in a global political and economic context. It looks at the way European encounters with other parts of the world and the subsequent colonial enterprise produced changes to the intellectual formation of Europe. It will also study how new conceptions of knowledge - about nature, about humans, and about God - were interwoven with social and political developments. In particularly, it will discuss how the rise of modern science in the seventeenth century and the emergence of a world view based on reason related to earlier ideas of natural magic. Topics will include Renaissance humanism and practical science, the Protestant reformations, demonology and witchcraft, the Columbian exchange and colonial trade, slavery, new natural philosophy and the mathematisation of nature, the emergence of the experimental method, science and early modern state formation, Newtonianism and the radical enlightenment, enlightenment science and colonial empires.

Note: This subject is jointly taught by the History and History and Philosophy of Science disciplines and is an elective in both majors.

We think that we know a great many things about the real, objective, material world. That Melbourne is in Victoria, that the Swans play out of Sydney, that water is H20, that the earth revolves around the sun, that other people exist, that we exist, are all common place beliefs that we take to be something that we know. But what, precisely does such knowledge consist in, or what is it to know something? If we lack clarity on what it is to know something, can we ever really be sure that what we think we know, we actually know…?

Philosophers since the very inception of the discipline, with Plato (4th C BCE), have been really worried about whether or not we know anything at all, or if we do, how much we know. Sceptics claim that we do not have any, or much, knowledge at all, while other philosophers claim that while we do have knowledge, this knowledge cannot be knowledge of a real, objective, material world, which exists independently of our thoughts.

This class will have a two-fold structure, with the first part involving us in a dive into some of the central historical writings regarding the problem of our knowledge of the external world. Besides providing some historical grounding, this will afford us an opportunity to open a discussion of some of the central concepts and issues at play in philosophical discussions of knowledge (e.g., the concept of knowledge itself, justification, doubt, certainty and scepticism). In the second part of the class, we turn to more contemporary (20th & 21st C) efforts to offer a systematic theory of what these concepts – notably knowledge and justification – involve, as well as efforts to reply to some of the sceptical challenges to our everyday beliefs about an independently real, objective, material world.

This subject deals with the power and limits of logic. We will cover some of the great conceptual advances in logic in the 20th Century, which have revolutionised our understanding of logic and language, of models and meaning, and of concepts and computation. We will examine the conceptual foundations of logic and the way it can be applied, not only to develop theories in other domains, but how we can learn the limits of logic when we attempt to apply its power to logic itself. In the course we will examine fundamental results such as (1) the soundness and completeness of different proof systems of first-order predicate logic, (2) the boundary between the countably infinite and the uncountably infinite (3) the boundary between the computable and the uncomputable, and (4) Gödel's incompleteness theorem and its consequences. Concepts and results will be approached via both practical exposure to formal techniques and proofs and theoretical and philosophical reflection on those techniques. Students will be able to appreciate the philosophical importance of the major logical results and equipping them for further work in logic in philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, computer science and related fields.

In England, between 1750 and 1914, scientific testimony increasingly became a feature of the law. In particular, the scope given to the expert witness shaped the development of the common law. The forensic sciences, in general, became a tool for identifying the criminal, while forensic psychiatry, in particular, was integral to developing new notions of criminal culpability and responsibility. In the process, society's understanding of both crime and the criminal was significantly modified by the emergence of these new sciences.

This subject will focus on the remarkable record-set that has been provided by the digitisation of the Old Bailey Session Papers (OBSP). As London's Central Criminal Court, the Old Bailey was the predominant theatre of crime and punishment in the largest city in the world. The OBSP provides transcripts of the trials which offer extraordinary insights into the workings of the law and the past lives of the long dead historical actors. At the same time, they allow us to chart the transformations wrought upon law and society by the emergence of the forensic sciences.

Madness, insanity, lunacy, losing one’s mind, nervous breakdown, psychosis, neurosis; some of the myriad terms that have been used to describe what happens when a person is deemed to no longer have control over word, thought or deed. It is one of the most baffling of phenomena and has been for millennia.

“Minds and Madness” explores the terms using lenses provided by history and philosophy. We focus on a number of inter-related questions:

• whether mental illnesses are natural kinds (i.e. are they real and if so what is the nature of their reality)?
• how have underlying theories of cause and pathology created specific therapeutic measures?
• and what has been the relationship between the psych-sciences and power (focusing upon patients, practitioners, and the intersections of ethnicity, class and gender)?

A flavour of the subject is captured by the people, events and therapies we explore: Burton, Descartes and Locke; asylums, mental hospitals and therapeutic communities; psychosurgery, electro-convulsive therapy, psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry and psychopharmacology; the major contemporary disease-categories (schizophrenia, bi-polar &c.) and disease-categories that have morphed or disappeared (fugue, melancholia, hysteria). We explore the history of classification systems (e.g. the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) and the different disciplines that have produced them (psychiatry, psychology and neurology). By the end of the subject students should have a profound understanding of the nature of the psych-sciences and the people and conditions they have sought to understand and treat.

“Minds and Madness” is a blended-learning subject. Lectures are provided online as weekly modules. They combine text, images, links, video and extensive bibliographies. Students are asked to explore these, addressing the questions raised in the modules. They also attend a two-hour workshop where the major issues are explored, while ideas and assessments are workshopped. It is a subject that will appeal to anyone who has an interest in psychiatry, psychology, the neurosciences, and history and philosophy more generally.

This subject is designed to give students an understanding and knowledge of the variability of past civilisations by comparing their accomplishments and inner structures. Using a combination of texts and archaeology, it will compare the life cycle (rise and fall) of Egyptian, Near Eastern and Persian civilisations. Students will examine cultural elements such as belief systems, daily routines, gender roles, power and authority, which will provide an insight into the distinctive worldviews that shaped each civilization. Material culture, historical documents, language and literature, will be combined to address major issues such as the social evolution of complex societies and their eventual collapse, themes which resonate in the contemporary world.

This subject will examine the following questions: what exactly do we mean by gender diversity, who do current ideas include or exclude, why and when is it important, and how should we try to achieve it?

The what, why and how of gender diversity are fundamental questions relating to organizational management, performance and productivity, social values, fairness and justice, as well as the ethical and legal obligations of organisations. This subject explores these issues from ethical, empirical, historical and practical perspectives. It takes an interdisciplinary approach that draws on management science, philosophy, psychology and leadership studies , and provides opportunities for students to apply contemporary academic understandings to their current and future work roles.

In a learning environment that actively draws on the diverse perspectives of students from across faculties, the subject will explore topics such as:

• The legal and social history of rights and representation in the workplace
• The business case for gender diversity
• The social justice case for gender diversity
• The ethics of affirmative action
• Practical scripts and strategies for motivating and leading change in the workplace