We discussed Week 4 of “Philosophy and the Sciences: Introduction to the Philosophy of Physical Sciences” the course from Edinburgh University here.  The topic was The Anthropic Principle and the Multiverse.  We were OK with the weak anthropic principle: the kind of observers we are will set restraints on the kind of conditions that we are… Read more

We discussed Week 3 of “Philosophy and the Sciences: Introduction to the Philosophy of Physical Sciences” the course from Edinburgh University.  We spent much of the time trying to understand Cosmology by going through the NASA primer at https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/  together, as we found Alasdair Richmond difficult to follow.  This was very fruitful, particularly when augmented by… Read more

We discussed Week 2 of “Philosophy and the Sciences: Introduction to the Philosophy of Physical Sciences” the course from Edinburgh University. We tried to track the journey from a steady state theory of the universe through to the big bang theory, and how we know the universe is expanding. We had dipped into Thomas Hertog’s… Read more

We discussed the first week of the Coursera course from Edinburgh University “Philosophy and the Sciences: Introduction to the Philosophy of Physical Sciences.” ​ www.coursera.org/learn/philosophy-physical-sciences This was a return to some key concepts in philosophy of science: Popper’s Falsification, Underdetermination, and Kuhn’s proposition that “normal” science is conducted within the limits of the currently accepted… Read more

An archive of summaries of all the meetings of Groups 1 and 2 can be found here. It can be useful as a source to search for anything we have discussed in the past. Read more