Course Descriptions

Course Title: Adv. Topics in Phil of Science: The Mentaculus

Statistical mechanics is concerned with the relationship between the fundamental physical description of the world and the various special sciences – and the foundations of statistical mechanics is taken up with various conceptual and philosophical questions that collect around that relationship: Questions about the nature of laws and objective probabilities, the characterization and explanation of thermodynamic and other macroscopic states and regularities, and the nature and origins of the various arrows of time.

Among the issues we will be discussing are:

1. The statistical-mechanical account of the time-directedness of various macroscopic

physical processes (as, for example, in the second law of thermodynamics), and the

asymmetries in our epistemic access to, and our ability to influence and control, the

past and the future.

2. How the conditional probabilities that emerge from statistical mechanics structure the

relationships between fundamental physics and the special sciences, and the role that

Those probabilities play in contemporary accounts of counterfactuals and causation.

3. The relevance of statistical mechanics to long-standing puzzles about the relationship

between physical laws and freedom of will.

Week 1. Background in Classical Mechanics and Thermodynamics (Albert)

Week 2.Boltzmann and Gibbs approaches Statistical Mechanics (Albert)

Week 3.  Entropy, the second law and the Past Hypothesis (Albert)

Week 4. Views about the metaphysics of objective probability and laws of nature (Loewer)

Week 5.  Laws and probability continued (Loewer)

Week 6.   Records and the asymmetry knowledge of the past and future (Albert)

Week 7. Objective conditional probabilities as targets for subjective degrees of belief (Loewer)

Week  8. Counterfactuals (Loewer)

Week 9. Counterfactuals and statistical mechanics (Albert and Loewer)

Week 10. The asymmetry of influence and the question of free will (Albert and Loewer)

Week 11. Causation (Loewer)