Science is phenomenally successful at predicting and explaining the world we live in including our own biology. Without the technological advances brought about by science, our lives would be radically different: no electricity, no cars, no smart phones, no plastics, no arthroscopic surgery, no antibiotics, no GPS, and on and on. Science tells us what the fundamental structure of reality is like: space and time, the soup of fundamental particles occupying it and composing us, and the fundamental forces that govern their behavior. Many suspect that the world the sciences show us leaves no space for God(s), and maybe doesn't leave much space for things like morality or free will either. But does science really succeed in all of these ways or only in some of them? When it succeeds, what accounts for its success? What does it take for a way of investigating the world to count as scientific?
4 units · Letter (ABCD/NP)
Science is phenomenally successful at predicting and explaining the world we live in including our own biology. Without the technological advances brought about by science, our lives would be radically different: no electricity, no cars, no smart phones, no plastics, no arthroscopic surgery, no antibiotics, no GPS, and on and on. Science tells us what the fundamental structure of reality is like: space and time, the soup of fundamental particles occupying it and composing us, and the fundamental forces that govern their behavior. Many suspect that the world the sciences show us leaves no space for God(s), and maybe doesn't leave much space for things like morality or free will either. But does science really succeed in all of these ways or only in some of them? When it succeeds, what accounts for its success? What does it take for a way of investigating the world to count as scientific?
Offered in Winter 2026 at Stanford University.