Modul LS2800 G

Workload:

• 70 Hours private studies
• 45 Hours in-classroom work

Contents of teaching:

• Science, technology and medicine permeate modern societies to increasing degrees. But what distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge, and how does its application impact our way of life? This module will introduce you to the foundations of philosophy of science through a lecture and a compact seminar in which we will discuss recent developments in the biosciences. You will learn to apply conceptual analysis and arguments in order to elucidate and evaluate such developments with regard to their philosophical, ethical, historical and social concequences. For this purpose, the compact seminar will turn to a theme that is currently hotly debated under the catchword „Big Data“. This is actually not a recent theme in the biosciences. Many biological disciplines – including botany, biogeography or ecology -- but also medical disciplines like pathology or epidemiology have always been data-driven rather than hypothesis-driven. While these disciplines were pushed into the background by molecular biology in the twentieth century, they experienced a renaissance in the last two decades associated with the rise of new research programmes such as biodiversity research, evidence based medicine or precision medicine. In the seminar we will discuss on the basis of historical sources, select scientific papers and documents from popular media how the life sciences collect, process and communicate data, which roles classifications, algorithms and models play in these processes, and which new ethical problems data-intensive research faces.