Jan-Willem Romeijn
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Courses in 2010-2011
This academic year I am teaching the following courses:

  • Philosophy of science I, BA first year. This course is an introduction in the philosophy of science for philosophers, dealing with the nature of scientific theory, the problem of induction, realism, and scientific method.
  • Philosophy of science, Minor. This course is an introduction in the philosophy of science for scientists, dealing with topics such as natural laws, induction, explanation, experimentation, and scientific inference.
  • Philosophy of the natural sciences, BA third year. A number of themes in the philosophy of the natural sciences are presented, and illustrated with some examples from science: classical mechanics, the physics of space and time, non-euclidean geometries, the direction of time, 'chaos theory', chance and determinism, and the quantum-mechanical nature of matter
  • Philosophy of psychology, together with Fred Keijzer, BA third year. In this course I discuss a number of themes on the intersection of psychological science and philosophy of science, like psychological models and explanations, the use of introspection and experimentation in psychology, scientific inference and statistics in psychological research, and themes like reductionism, evolutionary psychology, and free will and determinism.
  • Statistical inference and causality, MA course. This course covers a number of specific discussions in the philosophy of science: classical vs Bayesian statistics, model selection and simplicity, probabilistic causality, and Bayesian networks.
  • Analytical methods, MA course. This is a research master course introducing our best students to the analytic method by showing some examples of good analytic philosophy, thereby implicitly investigating what that method really is.

Past courses
In past years I have among other things also taught the following courses:

  • Belief, probability, and uncertainty, MA course. An introduction into probabilistic models of belief and reasoning, starting with an overview of interpretations of probability, and ending with a number of debates in formal epistemology concerning confirmation, evidence, and abduction.
  • Philosophical foundations of psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, BA second year. This course introduced themes from the philosophy of science to psychology undergraduates.
  • Formal approaches to scientific method, together with Theo Kuipers, MA course. This course introduced two important research programmes in the philosophy of science: confirmation theory and truth approximation. It highlights their common objectives, as well as some differences in motivation and outlook.
  • Probabilistic logic and probabilistic networks, a course in ESSLLI 2008 on the work of the research collective Progicnet.
  • Statistical inference, causality, and philosophy of science, various BA and MA courses at the Department of Psychology and Institute of Logic, Language and Information, University of Amsterdam. Most of this material comes back in courses on these topics that I teach this year.
  • General philosophy of science, Department of Philosophy, University of Groningen, BA second year. This is the forerunner of Philosophy of Science for the Philosophy Minor.