Redefining Reality - The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science

are surprising regularities in our experiences that are beyond our
ability to control or create. When we keep careful track of our
observations, intricate patterns emerge that can be generalized to
systems we had never previously known or imagined.
The study of these patterns of observations is science. We look
at patterns and create theories to explain their appearance. These
theories, in turn, posit mechanisms that are supposed to be in the
world and are responsible for creating the patterns. We can use
those theories not only to explain what we have already seen but to
predict new observations we have yet to make. If those predictions
come true, we take it as evidence that the mechanisms in the theory
are likely an actual part of the real world.
When we have new theories that replace our old ones, we not only
gain new understandings about how our observations relate to each
other, but we conceive of the world itself in new and strange ways.
This is where science and philosophy meet. Scientists give us new
accounts of how the universe works, and philosophers unpack those
theories to see what they tell us about what is real.
In this course, we will look at the ways we have been forced to reunderstand
reality in the face of science in the 20 th and 21 st centuries
and how that relates to other intellectual endeavors.
According to Descartes, we are made up of two parts, a body and
a mind. The body is mechanical and runs according to the laws of
physics. The mind (for Descartes, the soul) is non-material and is
where the will resides. For centuries, medical science was based
entirely on this picture of the human body as a machine.
In the 1840s, Ignaz Semmelweis was an Austrian doctor working in
the First Maternity Ward at Vienna General Hospital.
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