| Description
| Since the beginning of modernity, the natural sciences have increasingly come to define for us what can and what cannot count as knowledge of the real. Scientists, we believe, deal with that which is hard and fast. They do not have to rely on mere rhetoric, but can let the facts speak for themselves. Yet in constructing their hypotheses, scientists, too, rely on criteria that are irreducible to facts - thus the theoretical physicist Paul Dirac famously proclaimed as his most fundamental belief that the mathematical equations expressing nature's laws would be beautiful. More importantly, it is not only the scientists themselves who decide what is to be done with their discoveries, but other people whose understanding of and expectations towards the natural sciences are primarily shaped by the metaphors and narratives that circulate in their culture - shaped, i.e., by the rhetoric of science, rather than by science itself.
In this course, we will read the work of thinkers who have tried
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