COURSE OBJECTIVES: At the end of this course, students will have learned about the problem of normativity in naturalized epistemology, a good solution to this problem by Larry Laudan (his normative naturalizm) and objections to this solution. Furthermore, students will have also learned the problem of scientific theory change through time and Laudan solution with his normative naturalizm.

COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this course, we will trace Larry Laudan’s normative naturalism (“Normative naturalism is a view about the status of epistemology and philosophy of science; it is a meta-epistemology.”) throughout his naturalist philosophy of scientific change and his later publications together with the reviews by assenters and dissenters and his responses to these. Laudan’s normative naturalism is an important contribution to Quine’s project of naturalized epistemology and a solution to its normativity problem (perhaps to naturalization of any normative discipline, such as ethics) which was hinted at but never developed by Quine himself. (Laudan refused that Quine ever suggested any solutions at all while Quine completely ignored Laudan’s work. What a shame: they would have made a great team.) Anyway, normative naturalism, whoever leads it, is of great importance to both philosophers and scientists because the time has come for philosophy and science to become united again as they used to be.