Exam: Mon 19 Oct 2026 · Lecture notes: 9 · Flashcards: 496 · Exam questions: 54
Schedule, assessment and deadlines live in the course overview.
Flashcards
496 short single-fact cards across 9 sets. Open the flashcards to study the whole course, one lecture, or any mix of lectures. Each lecture note also ends with its own set.
Exam questions: 54 long-form exam-style questions with key points and model answers, for written practice.
Lecture notes
- L01 Introduction and Logical Empiricism · 38 cards
Rationalism, empiricism and Kant, The Vienna Circle and logical positivism, Analytic and synthetic statements, The verifiability criterion of meaning, … - L01b Popper and Lakatos · 47 cards
Popper on demarcation and falsifiability, Conjectures and refutations, The asymmetry of verification and falsification, Ad hoc rescue and the conventionalist stratagem, … - L02 Kuhn on Scientific Practice · 64 cards
Kuhn’s historical turn, Paradigms, normal science and puzzle-solving, Anomaly, crisis and scientific revolution, Why revolutions are necessary and paradigm debates circular, … - L03 Under-determination · 46 cards
Duhem’s under-determination thesis, Crucial experiments and good sense, Quine’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism, The web of belief and the Duhem-Quine thesis, … - L03b GenAI, Writing and Philosophical Learning
The course policy on GenAI use, Strengthening versus replacing your own learning, The AI use statement for the paper, Requirements and writing advice for the paper, … - L04 Scientific Explanation and Understanding · 67 cards
Hempel’s deductive-nomological model, Inductive-statistical explanation, Asymmetry, irrelevance and correlation objections, Causal-mechanical explanation (Salmon), … - L05 Scientific Realism and its Critiques · 60 cards
Metaphysical realism and idealism (Berkeley), Kant’s noumena and phenomena, Eddington’s two tables, Mach’s radical empiricism and instrumentalism, … - L06 Scientific Realism and the Pessimistic Meta-Induction · 60 cards
Where the realism debate stands after week 5, Realism as belief in approximate truth, and theories with parts, The mature-theories reply to the pessimistic meta-induction, Kitcher on reference, and Stanford’s reply, … - L07 Laws of Nature · 56 cards
Where the idea of laws of nature came from, Laws versus accidental generalisations, Counterfactuals, possible worlds and causation, Ontology, state space and nomological possibility and necessity, …