5/2 Laufer Center Seminar
Michael Strevens, PhD
Professor
Philosophy Department
New York University
The Highly Effective Irrationality of Science
Modern science has done amazing things: creating covid vaccines, sending humans to the moon, finding the ultimate nature of light. What makes it so powerful—and so different from the attempts to understand nature made by the philosophers and monks of old? Leaping from Aristotle to gravitational waves, Michael Strevens argues that much of science’s power derives from an epistemic limitation that can only be understood as irrational. The paradigmatic scientist is a paradigmatic reasoner in many ways, but in at least one way, their perfection as a scientist lies in the deliberate cultivation of a gaping intellectual blind spot.
Host: Bruce Futcher
A light lunch will be served following the seminar in room 110
