| Status: | Active, open to new members |
| Coordinator: | |
| When: | Monthly on Tuesday mornings 10:00 2nd Tuesday morning of the month |
| Venue: | (contact coordinator) |
There are four philosophy groups and Group 2 looks at topics with a scientific theme. (Group 1 discusses general topics in philosophy, Group 3 followed a "Crash course" to get into the subject, and now Group 4 is following the same path.) New members are welcome to join the most appropriate group. Contact one of the co-ordinators to just come and see what it's like, and if you might be interested.
The image above is "The Philosophers" by Pietro della Vechia, showing Ptolemy and Euclid, Greek philosophers of science. The image is in the public domain via Wiki Commons, and the original hangs in the Christ Church Gallery, Oxford
In Group 2 we don't follow a formal training course and we are not led by a tutor. We have studied the Philosophy of Science and discussed various science oriented topics - The Mind, Time, a scientific approach to religion, and various issues in Bio-Ethics. We revisited the basics of philosophy of science in "50 Philosophy of Science Ideas you really need to know" by Gareth Southwell. We have read to Richard Dawkins' "The Selfish Gene". We have studied the philosophy of maths and Time and Bioethics. We discussed the Reith Lectures on AI. We completed a course on the Philosophy of Cognitive Sciences. We have read Jim Al-Khalili's "The Joy of Science" and followed Daniel Chamovitz' Coursera lectures on plant biology. We went back to AI and looked again at consciousness, moving on via left- and right- brain thinking to Kahneman's System 1 and System 2 thinking. We have been studying cosmology and wondering whether theories about the origins of the universe are science, or just another creation myth, and we followed that with a look at Religion and Science. After a few different topics we returned to time. We then took a deep dive into AI and its implications and what constitutes life. We are looking further into genetics and epigenetics.
Forthcoming meetings
Past meetings
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.