Archive

6-10 July 2026

Lecturers

• Stephan Holland (University of York)
• Veronica Moretti (University of Bologna)
• Sean A. Valles (Michigan State University)

Course Description

‘Global health’ has attracted wide attention. This program will explore this interdisciplinary topic from a variety of different but interrelated perspectives. First, global health reveals significant health disparities: but what causes these, and which disparities are unjust and demand redress?  How types of social oppression – such as, racism and heterosexism – relate to health injustices will be explored, alongside investigating the contentious role of advocacy in public health.  

Second, global health reveals dilemmas between individual rights and communal benefits.  For example, clinical trials funded by Western pharmaceutical companies benefit and exploit participants in low-income countries; measures to control the spread of Covid-19 protected and restricted individuals; and international differences in assisted dying legislation largely depend on how much a jurisdiction values individual autonomy.  Such dilemmas are viewed through a philosophical bioethics/public health ethics lens.

Third, global health will be explored from a sociological and humanistic perspective, emphasizing how health is shaped by global interdependencies, power relations, and cultural meanings. Moving beyond biomedical paradigms, the sociology of health can highlight the social, political, and epistemological dimensions of illness, care, and inequality.  In addition, Graphic Medicine as an innovative visual and narrative approach to representing experiences of vulnerability and global crisis, will be introduced.

Topics

• History of efforts to account for what causes public health disparities, and what makes a disparity an injustice/inequity in need of intervention
• Efforts to theorize how various types of social oppression relate to health injustices and the amelioration of those injustices
• Role of advocacy in public health, including limits on the roles of public health experts in crafting social policies around issues such as immigration and climate change
• Ethics of clinical trials by Western pharmaceutical companies that take place in low-income countries
• Justification for liberty-limiting measures to control the spread of Covid-19 around the globe
• International differences in forms of assisted dying and which, if any, are justifiable
• The conceptual evolution from Public Health to One Health and Planetary Health, focusing on how sociological approaches reframe health as a relational and systemic phenomenon
• Postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, questioning how global health reproduces colonial hierarchies and epistemic injustices
• Visual storytelling: how comics and graphic narratives contribute to understanding emotional labour, care, and social inequality in health

Lecturers

• Program Director: Kevin D. Hoover (Duke University)
• Co-teacher: Jennifer Jhun (Duke University)
• Visiting Lecturer: Marcel Boumans (University of Utrecht)

Course Description

Models and their econometric estimation play an increasingly important role in modern economic and political life. From macroeconomic policy and financial regulation to public health and climate policy, models contribute to shaping policies. The generation of ever more data is likely to support the proliferation of models and econometrics. Research resources in academia focus on the theoretical foundations of the underlying model and on the statistical methods of econometrics; much less attention is devoted to the epistemological challenges of the underlying concepts, the normative challenges of the everyday work with econometrics, and the application of its results in policy decisions and evaluation.

The objective of this program is to increase attention amongst philosophers of science, academic economists, and empirical economists in policy institutions (eg, central banks) to these issues.

The course is also structured around a particular point of view – namely, that economics is a science of models and that most of the main features of econometrics relate generally to the role of models in science.

Topics

• History of econometrics to frame the philosophical issues to be discussed in the course
• The Vienna Circle and econometrics
• Values and Ethical Pitfalls in econometric research
• Key philosophical issues of how models relate to the world and how they relate to each other
• Data: observation, classification, and measurement of economic variables from a modeling point of view
• Conceptual issues related to modeling randomness
• The identification problem: how possibly, if at all possible, to map descriptive relations onto theoretical variables?
• Issues related to optional stopping, search methodologies, and the proper interpretation of results obtained through search
• Different approaches to the nature of causation and different strategies of causal inference
• The conceptual basis of graphical causal modeling and controlled, natural, and field experiments
• The conceptual issues surrounding the problem of model uncertainty, as well as some of the strategies economists use to address it

9-13 September 2024

Lecturers

• Jessica Carter (Aarhus University)
• Yacin Hamami (ETH Zurich)
• Leon Horsten (University of Konstanz)
• Guest Lecturers: Deborah Kant (University of Hamburg) | Matthew Inglis (Loughborough University)

Course Description

The second European Summer School on the Philosophy of Mathematics will focus on different topics in the philosophy of mathematics, its foundations, as well as on the philosophy of mathematical practice. We are happy to invite abstract submissions by graduate students (MA and PhD). The School will be hosted in person at the University of Vienna and will include three tutorials by distinguished scholars as well as a training unit on "Quantitative and qualitative empirical methods for philosophers of mathematics" by Matthew Inglis and Deborah Kant (provided by the CIPSH Chair DMRCP ("Diversity of Mathematical Research Cultures and Practices")). 

The school aims to bring together Master and PhD students interested in the connection between philosophy and mathematics, giving them the opportunity to discuss related topics with leading scholars in the field.

Topics

• Mathematical knowledge and mathematical understanding
• Justification and representation in mathematics
• Informal proofs and mathematical rigor
• The role of intuition and diagrams in mathematical reasoning
• Experimental mathematics and mathematical practice
• Mathematical ontology

10-19 July 2023

Lecturers

• Candis Callison (University of British Columbia)
• Deborah Coen (Yale University)
• Eric Winsberg (University of Cambridge/University of South Florida)

Course Description

Climate science, understood as an interdisciplinary field of study of the Earth’s climate and the causes and effects of climate change, is clearly of central importance today. The summer school will explore climate studies from a historical, philosophical, and sociological perspective. Topics to be covered will include: foundations and methodological issues relating to climate science, including various definitions of climate change, different types of models of climate change, and the use of simulations; further, historical roots and the development of climate science before and after the “computer age”; finally, issues concerning science policy and the communication of findings of climate science to a general public.

Topics

• Defining climate and climate change
• Evidence for climate change
• Modelling climate change: issues of confirmation and prediction
• Climate change and decision theory
• History of climate science as a research program
• Climate science in the public debate

4-13 July 2022

Lecturers

• Catherine Elgin (Harvard University)
• Chiara Ambrosio (University College London)
• Dominic McIver Lopes (University of British Columbia)

Course Description

The "two cultures" meme encourages a picture of art and science as opposites, and as sharing so little in common that it is difficult to "bridge" a deep gap between them. In fact, however, the arts and the sciences share many of the same representational tools, and exploit many of the same cognitive processes responsible for the working of those representational tools. This two-week workshop explores what can be learned about the arts and the sciences through an examination of their common languages, practices, and methodologies. Topics to be covered include: depiction, fiction and imagination, narrative, metaphor and analogy, and aesthetic value in science and the arts. Drawing on historical and contemporary approaches, we will examine the epistemic role of these phenomena in the sciences and also to their role in presenting scientific results.

Topics

• Art and science - two cultures?
• Theories of depiction and images in science
• Theories of fiction and models as fictions
• Aesthetic value in science
• Metaphor in science
• Imagination in art and science

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the Summer School had to be cancelled in 2020 and 2021. Its topic “Representation in Art and Science” was been postponed to 2022.

1-12 July 2019

Lecturers

• Rachel Cooper (Lancaster University)
• Dominic Murphy (The University of Sydney)
• Tim Thornton (University of Central Lancashire)
• Guest lecturer: Raffaella Campaner (Università di Bologna)

Course Description

Psychiatry raises as many conceptual as empirical questions. The philosophy of psychiatry is a rapidly emerging field which draws broadly on philosophical traditions – centrally analytic philosophy and phenomenology – to address a range of questions as broad as the demands made on psychiatry to address problems of human suffering, distress and disorder. It is also an area where philosophical methods, accounts and theories can be applied to and thus tested against psychiatric and psychopathological phenomena.

Topics

• The concept of mental disorder
• Psychiatric classification
• The role of values in psychiatry
• Social constructionist accounts of disorder
• The roles of explanation and understanding, including idiographic and narrative understanding in psychiatry delusions
• Culture bound syndromes
• Social epistemology
• Recovery

2-13 July 2018

Lecturers

• Elke Brendel (University of Bonn)
• James Robert Brown (University of Toronto)
• John D. Norton (University of Pittsburgh)
• Guest lecturer: Mauricio Suárez (Complutense University of Madrid)

Course Description

Are thought experiments epistemic miracles that enable us to learn about the world merely by reflections from the comfort of our armchairs? Or are they merely picturesque devices for clarifying and revealing to us what we already knew? Or should we conceive of their role in some other way? This summer school examined thought experiments and their role in science and philosophy. It considered general problems of principle concerning thought experiments as well as the place and function of exemplar thought experiments largely drawn from physical sciences, but from philosophy and mathematics, as well.

Topics

• Typology of thought experiments
• Function of thought experiments
• Epistemology of thought experiments
• The content and utility of particular thought experiments

3-14 July 2017

Lecturers

• Robert Cook-Deegan (Arizona State University)
• Paul E. Griffiths (University of Sydney)
• Jenny Reardon (University of California, Santa Cruz)
• Guest lecturer: William English (Georgetown University, Washington DC)

Course Description

Over the last two decades, genomics has emerged as a powerful site for not just re-configuring understandings and enactments of life, but also for understanding how these conceptions and enactments form in tandem with modes of ordering and governing lives. The two-week course explores conceptual innovations that draw these co-productive processes into view, as well as the histories and philosophies that deepen our understandings of not just genomics, but also our ever elusive efforts to make sense of life.

Topics

• Identities of “the gene”
• What is genetic information (a metaphor in search of a referent)?
• What is genomics? A story of co-production
• Race, difference, and genomics
• Patents and ownership
• Genomics amidst globalization and nation states
• Beyond bioethics
• Genomics and its public
• The post-genomic world
• Where are we headed?

4-15 July 2016

Lecturers

• Mark B. Brown (California State University, Sacramento)
• Heather Douglas (University of Waterloo, Ontario)
• Andrew Jewett (Harvard University)
• Guest lecturer: Alexander Bogner (Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Course Description

Many controversial public issues involve implicit assumptions about the relation of science, values, and democracy. Should climate scientists publicly advocate specific climate policies? Should lay citizens have a say in the allocation of public funds for science and technology? Should government legally require certain vaccinations, or ban certain areas of research? How should social values shape scientific research in genetics, public health, and many other fields? Public debates over issues like these echo a long history of conflicting views in political theory and the history, sociology, and philosophy of science. In all of these fields, the past fifty years have seen a shift away from foundationalist or essentialist approaches and toward an emphasis on the social and material context of scientific and political practices. The ideal of value-free science remains popular in public life, but most scholars now agree that science is shaped—often properly so—by social values, commercial pressures, and political decisions. Many interpreters still assume either that science and democracy invariably conflict or that they invariably reinforce each other, but a more detailed look reveals that the relation between them has varied enormously across time and place. And whereas many commentators still view democracy narrowly in terms of popular elections, recent scholarship shows that social institutions and material practices of all kinds—including many associated with science and technology—may become sites of democratic politics. This summer school will examine these developments in scholarship and public life, while also providing a stimulating context in which participants can develop their own views on the specific topics that most interest them.

Topics

• Roles of values in science
• Historical relations of science and democracy
• Public engagement in sociotechnical controversies
• Race, gender, and science
• Science and religion in democracies
• Politics of expert advice
• Public assessment of scientific expertise
• Science communication in democratic contexts
• Universities and public life

7-18 July 2014

Lecturers

• Richard Burkhardt (University of Illinois)
• Susan Jones (University of Minnesota)
• Georgina Montgomery (Michigan State University)
• Guest Lecturers: Mitchell G. Ash (University of Vienna), Herwig Grimm (University of Vienna), Tom Tyler (Oxford Brookes University)

Course Description

What are our cultural, ethical, biological, and historical relationships to the non-human animals that inhabit the planet with us? How have our perceptions of the similarities and differences between humans and animals changed over time, and what lies ahead? Claude Lévi-Strauss’s famous observation that “animals are good to think with“ becomes ever more potent when viewed in terms of the different ways that the human-animal boundary has been constructed in different socio-historical contexts. 
This course engaged with historical, philosophical, political and sociological dimensions of human-animal interactions as well as the epistemology of the sciences used to study animals.

Topics

• The human-animal boundary from Descartes to Darwin to the present
• Anthropomorphism
• The study of animal behavior
• Animals in institutions (zoos and labs)
• Wild animals, domestic animals, pets and vermin
• Diseases crossing the human-animal boundary
• Humans and other primates
• Aggression, gender, sexuality, and parenting in animals and humans
• Archaezoology
• Teaching courses in human-animal interactions

1-12 July 2013

Lecturers

• Jim Fleming (Colby College)
• Roman Frigg (London School of Economics)
• Wendy Parker (Ohio University)
• Guest Lecturer: Angela Kallhoff (University of Vienna)

Course Description

Climate is both a familiar dimension of human experience and a product of complex physical, chemical and biological processes. Recent concerns over anthropogenic global warming have sparked renewed attention to climate from a variety of perspectives: natural scientists are attempting to understand the record of past climate changes and the dynamics of the climate system; social scientists are investigating the human impacts of climate change, as well as opportunities for mitigation and adaptation; and scholars in the humanities are exploring historical perspectives on climate, the epistemology of climate science, the politics of the global warming debate, and ethical dimensions of climate change.
The course engaged with historical, philosophical, political and sociological dimensions of climate and climate change. Historical perspectives received particular attention, as the epistemology of climate science.

Topics

• Climate and climate change: the scientific basis
• Historical perspectives on climate change: Enlightenment to 1900
• Historical perspectives on climate change: The twentieth century
• Not just average weather: climate as agency and lived experience
• A molecular biography of CO2
• Fixing the sky: the quest to control climate
• Chaos and climate prediction
• Is climate change real?
• Models, measurement and the construction of global climate datasets
• Simulation and understanding in the study of weather and climate
• The costs of climate change: the debate over discounting
• Science for policy: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Debating climate change: consensus, doubt and proof in science
• Precaution and policy: ethical dimensions of climate change
• Uncertainty about future climate change: experts and ownership

2-13 July 2012

Lecturers

• Martin Carrier (Bielefeld University)
• Rose-Mary Sargent (Merrimack College)
• Peter Weingart (Bielefeld University)
• Guest Lecturer: William Butz (IIASA, Laxenburg)

Course Description

In the course of the twentieth century, science became increasingly intertwined with technology and matters of social relevance. As a result, science is viewed today as an essentially practical endeavor. Science and technology appear inextricably interwoven with one another. This development is viewed in many quarters as a fundamental reorientation of science and its relationship with technology. Science in the context of practice is assumed to operate under conditions significantly different from the rules and regulations of traditional academia.
Here are three overlapping themes in the course that deal with the topic from a historical, philosophical, and sociological perspective, respectively. The issue involves methodological and epistemological questions concerning research in the service of technological development as well as sociological questions about the institutional characteristics such research acquires. These questions give rise to various contrasts and oppositions such as commissioned research versus research in the public interest, epistemic research versus application-oriented research, research under the aegis of the linear model versus applied research.

Topics

• Nationalism, Commercialism, and Popularization (1750–1840)
• Utilitarianism, Positivism, and Victorian Society (1840–1900)
• The Professionalization of Science, Logical Empiricism, and the Rhetoric of Pure Science (1900–1950)
• National Politics and the Commodification of Science (1950–2000)
• Beyond 2000: A Reassessment of the Concept of Science in the Public Interest
• Values and Objectivity in Science
• Theories for Use: The conceptual structure of research in the context of application
• On the Question Dynamics of Research: Modes of Finding and Losing Research Topics in Science and Technology
• Science in the Grip of the Economy? Conditions of applicationoriented research
• Epistemic and Social Conditions of Scientific Expertise
• Knowledge, Politics and Commerce: The ethical dimension
• The self-referential direction of research
• Institutional patterns for basic and applied research
• Origins of the linear model and the innovation paradigm
• National Innovation Systems – the concept, comparative perspective
• Science funding or innovation policy?

4-15 July 2011

Lecturers

• Hasok Chang (University of Cambridge)
• Tal Golan (University of California, San Diego)
• David Lagnado (University College London)
• Guest Lecturer: Philip Dawid (University of Cambridge, UK)

Course Description

Concern with clear and demonstrable evidence resides at the heart of modern culture and its systems of knowledge. Every well-established group of practitioners seems to have a clear sense of what they count as good evidence, but when we look for a general characterization of evidence and its probative force, answers are difficult to come by. Philosophers, historians, jurists and scientists have all made serious investigations into the nature of evidence. Still, there is neither a widely agreed-upon theory nor a general rule of evidence that applies universally.
In this course we will explore various notions of evidence in various domains of theory and practice. Our program is distinctive in three ways. First, we will provide a broad multi-disciplinary inquiry into the nature of evidence, employing the combined resources of philosophy, psychology and history. Second, we will take a detailed look at the philosophical and historical contexts of various concepts of evidence in science, medicine and law. Third, we will make a sustained effort to link up abstract concepts and questions with concrete practices and moments.

Topics

• Philosophical theories of evidence and their problems
• Cognitive approaches to evidential reasoning
• Causal models in evidential reasoning
• Legal theories of evidence and their evolution
• Probabilistic and statistical handling of evidence
• Evidential reasoning in medicine
• Evidence for public policy and public consumption
• Professionalization, quantification and standardization of evidence
• Evidence, authority and commitment
• Social and moral dimensions of evidence
• Evidence in scientific practice

5-16 July 2010

Lecturers

• Uljana Feest (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Owen Flanagan (Duke University)
• Michael Pauen (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
• Guest Lecturer: J. Allan Hobson (Harvard Medical School, USA)

Course Description

It is commonly held that psychology began to be practiced "scientifically" in Leipzig in 1879. We will examine what this means, what the regulative metaphysical assumptions, constitutive ideas and techniques of a science of the mind were and are. In doing so, we will give a comprehensive overview over the science of mind, covering historical aspects, systematic problems, and empirical findings.
With respect to the historical contexts in which the scientific study of the conscious mind emerged, special attention will be dedicated to the contentious status of empirical psychology in turn-of-the century epistemological debates, leading up to important work of Carnap, Neurath, Feigl, Hempel and other members of the Vienna & Berlin Circles on the status of Geisteswissenschaften, the mind-brain relation, testability, and reduction. This work directly influenced empirical psychology, especially B. F. Skinner's Radical Behaviourism, which in turn affected the development of work in analytic philosophy of psychology and mind. This foundational philosophical work will also be connected with contemporary issues on neural correlates & neural identities, explanatory gaps, the hard problem(s) of consciousness, the problems of freedom and responsibility, and the prospects for achieving a mature neurophilosophy. Arguments that even a mature science of the mind cannot address certain important topics like the qualia problem will be evaluated from a systematical and a historical perspective. Skeptical positions with respect to the free will and self will be presented as well as experimental work that bears on these issues (i.e. decision making, intentionality, theory of mind, "mirror neurons"). Consequences of philosophical and empirical work for human self-understanding, the legal system, and everyday life will be discussed.

Topics

• Psychology to be practiced “scientifically”
• Regulative metaphysical assumptions
• Constitutive ideas and techniques of a science of the mind
• Comprehensive overview over the science of mind, covering historical aspects, systematic problems, and empirical findings
• Status of empirical psychology in turn-of-the century epistemological debates
• Vienna and Berlin Circles
• Contemporary issues on neural correlates and neural identities, explanatory gaps, the hard problem(s) of consciousness, the problems of freedom and responsibility, and the prospects for achieving a mature neurophilosophy
• Qualia problem from a systematical and a historical perspective
• The self and free will
• Experimental work that bears on decision making, intentionality, theory of mind, “mirror neurons”
• Consequences of philosophical and empirical work for human self-understanding, the legal system, and everyday life

13-24 July 2009

Lecturers

• Ronald Giere (University of Minnesota, USA)
• Mary Jo Nye (Oregon State University, USA)
• Alan Richardson (University of British Columbia, Canada)
• Guest Lecturer: Peter Galison (Harvard University, USA)

Course Description

With the rise of specialized sciences, understood to be autonomous from philosophy, and the rise of philosophical positivism, philosophers and scientists debated among themselves claims for objectivity, realism, and truth in the sciences. They discussed, too, the roles that scientists and scientific knowledge justifiably play in political systems, social policy, and technological development. As secularism strengthened and religious metaphysics waned, philosophers also began to concern themselves with the scientific standing of philosophy itself. Arguably, the debates about the scientific status of philosophy became the most crucial debates in the historical framing of twentieth-century philosophy. At this same time, however, the specialist sciences increasingly faced challenges to their traditional claims to universal knowledge.
There are three main overlapping themes in the course. One theme concerns crucial aspects of philosophical debates from roughly 1870 to 1950, the alternatives offered, and some lingering consequences for analytic philosophy that arise from its historical relations to scientific philosophy. A second theme concerns the possible replacement of the Enlightenment idea that science delivers the absolutely objective truth by the view that scientific knowledge is perspectival, and the consequences of this view for how contemporary scientists confront religion. A third theme concerns twentieth-century scientists and philosophers of science who sought to sort out questions of the social responsibilities of science, the social dimensions of science, and the truth of scientific claims.

Topics

• Scientific Perspectivism: An Alternative to Objectivist Realism
• Scientific Neo-Kantianism and Positivism in Germany from 1870 to 1914
• Naturalism, Pragmatism, and Experimentalism in American Philosophy of Science, 1870–1950
• Scientific Realism and Scientific Socialism in France from Belle Epoque to Cold War
• Bernalism and Approaches to the History and Philosophy of Science in Great Britain
• Hierarchy and Intention in Scientific Representation
• “Die wissenschaftliche Weltauffassung”: Logical Positivism from Austria and Germany to North America, 1920–1950
• Weimar Berlin and Historical Sources of the View of Science as Social Practice
• Politics and Values in the Philosophy of Science of Polanyi, Popper, and Kuhn
• Science without Laws, Realism without Truth, Judgment without Rationality
• Analytic Philosophy as Marginal Science
• Contemporary Scientists Confront Religion

30 June–11 July 2008

Lecturers

• Rachel A. Ankeny (University of Adelaide, Australia)
• Bernardino Fantini (University of Geneva, Switzerland)
• David Wootton (University of York, United Kingdom)
• Guest Lecturer: Keith Wailoo (Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA)

Course Description

The field of History and Philosophy of the Biomedical Sciences has, in the recent decade, become a hot spot in historical research and philosophical debate. The increasing place of biomedical sciences in contemporary societies and individual lives has raised many questions concerning the epistemological and practical status of biology and medicine.
The course will deal with some of the fundamental philosophical problems of biomedical sciences, raised by their historical development since the age of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century to the very contemporary development in biomedicine, biotechnology and medical practices.
Selected topics of historical and philosophical relevance will be covered, which are at the core of present-day debates and have great relevance for bioethical debates and social and political concerns on the role of biology and medicine in our societies. Particular attention will be devoted to some methodological issues and to the necessary link between historical and philosophical inquiries.
The course will be necessarily transdisciplinary and because of its advanced content, general background and introductory material will be distributed to the participants in advance in order to facilitate the discussion and a common reflection on the topics suggested.

Topics

• The epistemological status of medicine
• The Hippocratic tradition, from Hippocrates to the Nineteenth Century
• The origins of scientific medicine (16th-20th centuries)
• The concept of disease: Historical roots and philosophical perspectives
• Causality in biomedical sciences. An historical and epistemological analysis
• The pragmatics of causation in clinical practice
• The philosophical debate on the normal and the pathological
• The role of the case in medical reasoning
• The error in medicine
• From germs to genes: Theories on generation and infection (16th-20th centuries)
• Form, information, and programmes: The rise of the molecular explanation of life and disease
• Moral issues associated with gene therapy
• Darwinian Medicine: How evolution by natural selection can explain health and disease?
• Historical and epistemological issues associated with animal models in biomedical research
• The social and economical determination of health and disease: The McKeown Thesis
• Historical and epistemological issues in Evidence Based Medicine

17–28 July 2006

Lecturers

• Geoffrey Brennan (Duke University, USA)
• Hartmut Kliemt (University of Duisburg, Germany)
• Guest Lecturer: Rainer Hegselmann (University of Bayreuth, Germany)
• Assistant Lecturer: Bernd Lahno (University of Duisburg, Germany)

Course Description

The course deals with some fundamental problems of philosophy and economics, spanning a wide range of topics from ethics to methodology and addressing both substantial and formal, historical and topical issues. This approach shows how broad the field of "Philosophy, Politics, and Economics" has become, as is also reflected in our present interests as philosopher-economists. Alluding to one of John Broome's titles, we could say that we will have both "economics out of philosophy" and "philosophy out of economics". The course is genuinely interdisciplinary. In addition to material assigned for each lecture, general background material (as a sort of introductory course to "philosophy and economics") is provided in electronic form to facilitate an inter-disciplinary discussion.

Topics

• The economic approach to ethics
• Discounting the future
• Rational choice from a participant's and from the objective point of view
• Arrow and the economic approach
• Sen and Coase
• Trust, its role and its evolution
• Economising on virtue
• The economy of virtue
• David Hume's theory of government
• Esteem: conceptual and analytic
• No theory of justice
• Expressive voting
• Public and private responsibility in health care and the limits of state action

18–29 July 2005

Chance and Necessity. Historical and Systematic Inquiry

Lecturers

• Theodore M. Porter (University of California, Los Angeles, USA)
• Wolfgang Spohn (University of Konstanz, Germany)
• Guest Lecturer: Maria Carla Galavotti (University of Bologna, Italy)
• Assistant Lecturers: Deborah Coen (Harvard University, USA), Franz Huber (University of Konstanz, Germany)

Course Description

Chance and probability were never purely mathematical topics. In the European tradition, they were full of religious and philosophical significance from at least the period of the Renaissance. Since then they have become increasingly integral to natural science, and at the same time to social, political, medical, and economic affairs. The course surveys this large historical trajectory by focusing on some themes and moments of particular interest and significance.

The notion of probability is ubiquitously used in physical and social sciences. Despite its familiarity it is still ill understood. This holds in particular for the notion of chance or objective probability; various forms of frequency and propensity theories are designed to account for it, but none is particularly well received. The notion of natural or causal necessity is continuously used in the sciences, but almost entirely left implicit, whereas philosophers have given up on lawlikeness and widely diverge on causation.
The course attempts to accomplish three tasks: First, it intends to give an overview over the problematic situation. There is a perfect parallel between the case of chance and the case of necessity; to bring out this parallel is the second task of the course. Moreover, the basic reason for the problems lies in the fact that the objectivity involved in chance and necessity is still ill understood. A broadly projectivist account of this objectivity seems to be most revealing. So, the third goal is to give a precise account of the projectivist account of the objectivity of chance and natural necessity.

Topics

Historical Inquiry into Chance and Necessity

• Subjective and objective probabilities
• Statistical models in the sciences. statistics challenged some basic ideals of scientific reasoning
• A universe or chance. Statistics meant the taming of chance, order out of chaos
• In pursuit of objectivity. In the twentieth century, statistics became above all a set of mathematical strategies of scientific inference, which then were linked to canons of experimental design. In this guise, statistics contributed to a reshaping of public policy, and with it, of the public role of the scientist
• Markets and gambling. The science of reasoning under uncertainty, has been applied in the later twentieth century with great ambition to business and investing

Systematic Inquiry into Chance and Necessity

• General introduction into modality
• Subjective probability
• Objective probability: an overview
• David Lewis' conception of objective probability
• A projectivistic reconstrual of this conception
• Objectivistic conceptions of natural laws and causation
• Foundations for a subjectivistic account: ranking theory
• A ranking-theoretic account of laws of nature and causation
• How to objectify this account
• The probabilistic-deterministic parallel between chance and necessity

19–30 July 2004

Lecturers

• John Beatty (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, CAN)
• Michael Friedman (University of Stanford, USA)
• Helen Longino (University of Minnesota, USA)

Course Description

The importance of objectivity in the biological science is underscored by episodes in which external values have misled scientists. But what do we do with cases in which external values seem to have led scientists in the right direction? To address these issues, we will take an in-depth look at the role of natural theology and political economics in the development and reception of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Literature will include primary sources in 19th century natural history, natural theology, political economics and philosophy of science; secondary literature on the Darwinian revolution; and contemporary literature on objectivity and the distinction between internal and external values. The aim is primarily to advance our understanding of objectivity in science, but also secondarily to provide students with the resources to teach the Darwinian revolution, and to mine that set of developments for broader philosophical and science studies purposes.

The philosophical question concerning the objectivity of the physical sciences begins in the modern period with Kant's philosophy of natural science in the late eighteenth century. Kant made the objectivity of human cognition into a central philosophical theme, and he took the Newtonian mathematical physics that dominated the eighteenth century as one of his most important models of objective human knowledge as such. During the nineteenth century, however, a wide variety of new styles of physical theorizing were developed. Scientific philosophers of the nineteenth century, such as Helmholtz, Mach, and Poincaré, responded to these new developments and attempted, accordingly, to extend or modify the Kantian theory of objectivity to accommodate them. The development of non-Euclidean geometry also played an important role, since Euclidean geometry had provided Newton (and Kant) with an underlying mathematical framework within which physical theory was supposed to be formulated. Finally, the articulation of Einstein's theories of relativity at the beginning of the twentieth century appeared to undermine the Newtonian and Kantian pictures completely and led, for precisely this reason, to the radically new approach to scientific objectivity constructed by the logical empiricists in Vienna and Berlin. We shall examine these historical developments and then discuss their implications for objectivity in the physical sciences today. In particular, we will look at Kuhn's Structure of Scientific of Revolutions against this background and discuss the prospects that might emerge for a post-Kuhnian philosophy of scientific objectivity.

The lectures, concerning the quest for objectivity in the social sciences, will consider two kinds of challenge to objectivity ideals. The very attempt to develop scientifically objective accounts of scientific understandings of human life and activity on the model of physics has seemed to undermine conceptions of what it is to be human -- capacities of intentionality, deliberation, and self- reflection. Either such knowledge is not possible or what we take to be distinctive features of human life are an illusion. We will critically review the understanding of objectivity that results in this dilemma, focusing on forms of reductionism in biology and economics. Secondly the very possibility of objectivity for any science has been challenged by recent work in social, cultural, and feminist studies of science. We shall critically review the scope and force of these challenges. The conclusion will offer some suggestions towards resolution of both challenges.

14–27 July 2003

Lecturers

• Karl Sigmund University of Vienna, Austria)
• Eörs Szathmáry (Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary)
• Robert M. Wald (University of Chicago, USA)
• Assistant Lecturer: Daniel Holz (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

Course Description

Our world is not static, as was the prevailing view in past ages - but dynamic. It evolves. This holds for the large-scale structures in the universe as well as for the biomolecules. The Summer University 2003 was devoted to the major scientific aspects of cosmological and biological evolution, the key ideas of which originated in the early decades of the previous century.
The theory of general relativity revolutionized our view of the nature of space, time, and gravitation; and the neo-Darwinian synthesis merged genetics with the theory of natural selection. Both fields progressed enormously during the past forty years: the "big bang" theory was dramatically confirmed by the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, and evolutionary biology linked up with genomics. Yet we still do not know the answer to some very basic questions concerning, for instance, the origin of life or the origin and ultimate fate of the universe.
The lectures on cosmological evolution explained the basic nature of general relativity, described its implications for cosmology, and addressed recent developments in theoretical and observational cosmology. The lectures on biological evolution concentrated on the major transitions, in particular prebiotic evolution, the origins of multicellularity, the role of sex and the emergence of social structures. Topics included the principles of population genetics and ecological modelling, random drift and selection, competition and cooperation, and applications of game theory to population dynamics.

15–26 July 2002

Lecturers

• Michael Hagner (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany)
• Brian McLaughlin (Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA)
• Guest Lecturer: Anton Zeilinger (University of Vienna, Austria)
• Assistent Lecturers: Güven Güzeldere (Duke University, USA), Paul Ziche (Bayrische Akademie der Wissenschaften)

Course Description

Since the nineteenth century, experimental, clinical and anatomical studies of the brain have vastly determined the brain as an organ, in which various psychological qualities are located in different regions. This has resulted in a cerebral topography of man that seeks to decipher man beyond the mind-matter dualism. Thought in itself, perceptions and language, previously issues of philosophy, have now become an object of the life sciences. At the same time, however, models of cognition based on the language of thought have become crucial for the philosophy of mind. 

Around the middle of the twentieth century, the brain became conceptualized as a computer, and this led to numerous fruitful research enterprises. More recently, however, the equation between brain and computer has been challenged. One aim of this Summer University was to discuss various shifts in the relation between mind, brain and computation from historical and epistemological points of view. Moreover, the Summer University has focused on the relation between physiological and mental processes, for example the relation between low-level vision accounts of color perception and their interaction with theories of visual consciousness.

Topics

• Theoretical unification in physical science
• Vitalism, materialism, and reductionism in biology
• Relativity, complementarity, and underdetermination: Metaphors of multiplicity in twentieth-century science and philosophy
• The Unity of Science movement and the Vienna Circle
• The organization of scientific research
• Realism, reduction, simplicity, and explanation: Methodological perspectives on unification

16–28 July 2001

Lecturers

• Don Howard (University of Notre Dame)
• Elliott Sober (University of Wisconsin)
• Guest Lecturer: Brigitte Falkenburg (University of Dortmund, Germany)
• Assistent Lecturers: Christopher Hitchcock (California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA), David J. Stump (University of San Francisco, USA)

Course Description

A unified scientific understanding of nature was once a widely-accepted aim of science and remains so in more than a few areas of contemporary science. In recent years, however, both the possibility and the advisability of unification have been questioned, with some arguing that themeism should be prized in the sciences, perhaps for political as well as philosophical reasons. 
The course considered questions about unity and themeity in science from a variety of philosophical, historical, and institutional perspectives.

Topics

• Theoretical unification in physical science
• Vitalism, materialism, and reductionism in biology
• Relativity, complementarity, and underdetermination: Metaphors of multiplicity in twentieth-century science and philosophy
• The Unity of Science movement and the Vienna Circle
• The organization of scientific research
• Realism, reduction, simplicity, and explanation: Methodological perspectives on unification