Teaching philosophy of science that matters

Feminist Philosophy of Science : Standpoint Matters

Feminist standpoint theory has a contentious history. It is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology, characterized by the thesis that those who are marginalized or oppressed under conditions of systemic inequity may, in fact, be better knowers, in a number of respects, than those who are socially or economically privileged. Their epistemic advantage arises from the kinds of exper...

Philosophy matters in brain matters

PURPOSE Although most neuroscientists and physicians would argue against Cartesian dualism, Descartes's version of the psyche/soma divide, which has been controversial since he proposed it in the seventeenth century, continues to haunt contemporary neurological diagnoses through terms such as functional, organic, and psychogenic. Drawing on my own experiences as a person with medically unexplai...

Know Your Discipline: Teaching the Philosophy of Computer Science

The diversity and interdisciplinarity of computer science and the multiplicity of its uses in other sciences make it hard to define computer science and to prescribe how computer science should be carried out. The diversity of computer science also causes friction between computer scientists from different branches. Computer science curricula, as they stand, have been criticized for being unabl...

Teaching Philosophy

Teaching Philosophy

When I was actively taking classes as an undergraduate, one of my biggest concerns was that project courses typically lacked a fundamentally challenging problem; the challenge was typically in learning the details of tools used to solve some problem with an obvious solution, but not in finding a unique solution to the problem itself. My personal approach attempts to remedy this deficiency, sinc...