Lehrende/r: Univ.-Prof. Dr. Cornelis Menke
Veranstaltungsart: hybrid: Seminar
Anzeige im Stundenplan: HS/OS Earth Sciences
Semesterwochenstunden: 2
Unterrichtssprache: Englisch
Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: 1 | 40
Voraussetzungen / Organisatorisches: The seminar will be held in English.
Inhalt: Scientific controversies in geology and earth science have been widely discussed within philosophy of science. At the beginning of the 19th century, the debate between catastrophist theories of the earth and Lyell's uniformitarianism achieved wide attention, and philosophers of science like William Herschel and William Whewell, in their writings on the nature of science, frequently referred to geology and its development. Martin Rudwick's seminal account of The Great Devonian Controversy is probably still the most outstanding study in (integrated) history and philosophy of science we possess. The history of the seemingly belated acceptance of theories of continental drift in the mid-20th century was used by philosophers to support nearly every model of scientific change ever proposed (Popper's, Kuhn's, Lakatos's, Laudan's), or accounts of social epistemology (Miriam Solomon), or of the pursuit-worthiness of new ideas in natural science. The focus of the seminar will be on the most famous controversies in the history of geology --- the controversy between Neptunism vs Plutonism about the origin of stones, between uniformitarianism and catastrophism about how to inquire the history of the earth, and the debate about continental drift in particular -- and how they have influenced and shaped the way philosophers think about scientific change and progress.
