The course is divided in two parts: an introductive part and a monographic one. In the introductive part I present some basic themes debated in those philosophical circles discussing foundational issues in contemporary science. The presentation includes the historical genesis of these themes. Briefly, a possible list of themes is the following: styles of scientific reasoning and scientific explanation, scientific revolutions and scientific changes, the realism-antirealism contemporary debate, and so on. The monographic part develops some issues central to many contemporary philosophical debates on grounding physical sciences and special sciences like psychology and neuroscience: the nature of time and of our experience of it. Physical sciences and some special science (like neuroscience and scientific psychology) often describe time in ways not smoothly translatable in terms of our subjective experience of it. Indeed, the lesson on time extrapolated from science is in some way incompatible with our subjective representation of time. The course is an attempt to analyze the notion of physical time and the notion of experiential time through the comparative study of their properties and of their differences, along with an analysis of possible ways of reconciling some of their apparently deep differences.
Splitting the course’s content in two parts does not imply a temporal split. That is, although the first week will be focused on the canonical and introductive part, as of the second week general themes will be alternated to monographic ones. Within the canonical part, analytic notions like scientific explanation, scientific inference, realism and antirealism, and so on, are unpacked against three types of historical backgrounds. The first historical reconstruction follows the development of physics. Starting from the Copernican revolution I will arrive to Newton.
Then from there, I will arrive to present the contribution of Einstein to contemporary physics. His special and general relativity theories play a central role in many contemporary philosophical debates on grounding physics and grounding our subjective experience of the world. The second route follows the development of psychology and neuroscience. More precisely, the ways in which the scientific methodologies used by neuroscientists and psychologists to study human minds have been developing through modern and contemporary history. Finally, the third route follows the contribution of Darwin. From his theory of evolution in its original formulation to the later Darwinian framework built on the fusion of the initial Darwinian ideas with later achievements of genetics. The rationale behind the choice of this third route relies on acknowledging that the Darwinian framework have deep implications for contemporary psychology. Indeed a school of thought internal to the latter, also called evolutionary psychology, is an attempt to apply Darwinian ideas to the traditional philosophical analysis of human rationality. Within the monographic part I analyze issues concerning the nature of time. The most empirically robust physical theories assign to time properties which turn out to be extremely counterintuitive. For example, time does not pass and our experience of the passage of time is not rooted in the physical nature of time. Rather that experience seems to be rooted in the nature of our minds for some, or in the nature of non-temporal physical processes for others. We will explore some popular scientific literature along with some philosophical literature mainly concerning issues about the nature of physical time and the nature of the perceived time.