Teaching

Spring 2021, 2022, Fall 2022 - Philosophy of Science I (Primary Instructor)

Fall 2020 - Philosophy of Physics (Primary Instructor)

Fall 2020, 2021 - Scientific Method and Research Ethics (Co-taught)

Course webpage

Spring 2020, Fall 2019 - Morality and Medicine, HPS 0613 (Primary Instructor)

Course description: Ethical dilemmas in the practice of health care continue to proliferate and receive increasing attention from members of the health care profession, ethicists, policy makers, and the general public as health care consumers. In this course we will examine a number of ethical issues that arise in the context of contemporary medical practice and research by analyzing articles and decision scenarios. Topics to be covered typically include the physician-patient relationship; informed consent; medical experimentation; termination of treatment; genetics; reproductive technologies; euthanasia; resource allocation; and public health policy. Students who successfully complete this course will be able to identify and analyze different philosophical approaches to selected issues in medical ethics; have gained insight into how to read and critically interpret philosophical arguments; and have developed skills that will enable them to think clearly about ethical questions as future or current health care providers, policy makers, and consumers.
Syllabus (Fall 2019)
Syllabus (Spring 2020)

Spring 2018 - Space, Time and Matter, HPS 0545 (Primary Instructor)

Course description: Ever since the ancients first looked up at the sky, people have asked themselves questions: what are stars made of? Is the universe infinite? Does the evolution of the universe have a beginning or end, or is it eternal? The nature of the universe has been subject to human theorizing throughout history, and these theories have held a central place in physical sciences. This course is an introduction to the history of cosmology in the West from antiquity to the present day. We will investigate how models of the universe evolved from ancient Greece, through the Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century and the introduction of general relativity in the early 20th century, and into today. This historical survey will inform philosophical reflections, for example on the nature of space and time, and how these reflections informed the thinking about the universe throughout history.
Syllabus

Image from Andreas Cellarius' Harmonica Macrocosmica (1708), one of the documents available during a class visit to the Hillman Library Special Collections

Fall 2017 - Principles of Scientific Reasoning, HPS 0611 (Primary Instructor)

An overview of the structure of the course, used throughout the term to situate different topics

Course description: The course will provide students with elementary logic skills and an understanding of scientific arguments. Ours is an increasingly scientific and technical society. In both our personal life decisions and in our work we are daily confronted by scientific results which influence what we do and how we do it. Basic skills in analyzing the structure of arguments in terms of truth and evidence are required to make this type of information accessible and useful. We hear, for example, that drinking alcoholic beverages reduces the chances of heart disease. We might well ask what sorts of tests were done to reach this conclusion and do the tests really justify the claim? We read that certain geographical configurations in South America ‘prove’ that this planet was visited by aliens from outer space. Does this argument differ from other, accepted scientific arguments? This course is designed to aid the student in making sense of a variety of elementary logic skills in conjunction with the application of those skills to actual cases.
Syllabus

Spring 2016 - Mind and Medicine, HPS 0612 (Teaching Assistant)

Course description: This course is designed as an introduction to the philosophical issues that exist at the intersection of psychology and medicine. Among others, we will examine the following questions: What does it mean to be healthy? Can one define health and sickness purely objectively? Or does the notion of disease involve value judgments of various sorts? What does it mean to say that a disease is “genetic”? Are diseases always best explained by appealing to lower-level biological details such as genetics and biochemistry? What does it mean to appeal to biological “mechanisms" in explaining disease? Should human medical judgments (e.g., clinicians’ judgments) be replaced by purely automatic, computerized procedures? Are medical judgments influenced by various biases and can these biases be overcome? Are psychiatric disorders real? How should scientists best explain psychiatric disorders? Can evolutionary biology be useful to psychiatry? The goal of this class is to provide students with a critical understanding of these philosophical issues. Previous knowledge of biology, psychology, and medicine is not needed for this class. Key notions and theories in these fields will be introduced progressively.

Fall 2015: Introduction to Philosophy of Science, HPS 1653 (Teaching Assistant)

Course description: This course will provide a broad survey of a number of central schools, figures, and topics in general philosophy of science. We will consider in detail the views of the logical positivists as well as their critics, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper, Carl Hempel, the sociologists of science, and feminist philosophers of science. We will consider answers to such questions as: How does science differ from other forms of human knowledge? How are scientific claims supported by evidence? In what sense does science provide us with explanations or enhance our understanding of the world? Do scientific theories aim to describe the real structure of the world, or simply one that is useful? Do the unobservable entities postulated in scientific theories really exist? How could we know? We shall combine a reading of some classic texts along with more recent work.