Messages posted by: EricTS1050969

I have been teaching a course in history and philosophy of science to undergraduates for the past 5 years at UCLA. It is part of the honors collegium program and so enrollment comes from all disciplines represented on campus. It has been rather eye-opening to see that students from the humanities frequently perform better even they are not as familiar with science as science undergraduates. The reason for this is not so hard to discern. Humanities students know how to think better, read better and express themselves better. This point brings up one of the main reasons why science students benefit from courses on history and philosophy of science. As odd as it may sound it may be one of the few courses in which they are made to think rather than merely learning how to calculate or answer very narrowly conceived questions.

Now to make a quite different point. My background is in chemistry and I want to make a plea for the philosophy of chemistry a relatively new sub-discipline within the philosophy of science which until recently has tended to concentrate rather exclusively on physics and more recently on biology. And yet it is a fact that chemists far outnumber physicists and biologists.

Can I also make a shameless plug for my recent book which is all about the history and philosophy of chemistry and modern physics.

Eric Scerri, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance, by Eric Scerri, Oxford University Press, 2007.
named as "Outstanding Academic Book for 2007" by Choice Library Magazine.

UCLA faculty web page: http://www.chem.ucla.edu/dept/Faculty/scerri/

Periodic Table Website:
http://www.allperiodictables.com/apt/ClientPages/Scerripages/Scerri.html

Editor of Foundations of Chemistry,
http://www.springer.com/sgw/cda/frontpage/0,11855,4-40399-70-35545882-detailsPage%253Djournal%257CmostViewedArticles%257CmostViewedArticles,00.html

International Society for the Philosophy of Chemistry,
http://ispc.sas.upenn.edu/