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Science and Metaphysics
lecture course
Thursday 16:15 -
17:45 Room 208 (Múzeum krt. 4/i)
(The course will be
given in English, except if all students speak Hungarian. The exam can
be taken in English or Hungarian.)
The aim of the
course is to clarify the
role of scientific knowledge
(formal sciences included) in contemporary metaphysics and in
theoretical philosophy in general; and to review the most important
issues common to both contemporary analytical philosophy and
scientific discourse. The main topics include: events and entities;
time; space; particulars; universals; properties; supervenience and
reduction; similarity; identity; realism/anti-realism; abstract
entities; aprioricity; necessity; contingency; chance; laws of nature;
determinism/indeterminism; modal realism; causality; persistence;
personal identity; free will; agency.
Suggested readings:
- E. J. Lowe: A Survey of
Metaphysics, OUP 2002.
- L. E. Szabó: How can physics account for
mathematical truth?
- L. E. Szabó: Formal
Systems as Physical
Objects: A Physicalist Account of Mathematical Truth, International
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 17 (2003) pp. 117 –
125 (preprint: PDF)
- L. E. Szabó: What
remains
of probability?, in D. Dieks, W. Gonzalez, S. Hartmann, M. Weber, F.
Stadler and T. Uebel (eds.), The
Present Situation in the Philosophy of Science, Springer,
forthcoming. [PDF]
- L. E. Szabó: Objective
probability-like things with and without objective
indeterminism, Studies in History and Philosophy of
Modern Physics 38
(2007) 626–634 [Prepirnt
(PDF)]
- L. E. Szabó:The
Einstein--Podolsky--Rosen Argument and the Bell Inequalities, Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2008)
Credit requirements:
- oral exam from the material of the lectures
2010-05-06
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Philosophy Building
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