This was published a few years before “Studies in the Logic of Explanation,” but Hempel and Oppenheim had collaborated already in the mid-1930s, so Oppenheim may have had an influence on this work, too. (Oppenheim has an unusual biography: he was a chemist and businessman who left business in his late 40s—this was in the early 1930s when the Nazis came to power—and, for the rest of his life—more than 40 years—lived as an independently wealthy scholar, who was a friend of scientists and philosophers—among them, Einstein—and who supported younger scholars, like Hempel, who collaborated with him on philosophical work.)
I’ve assigned this paper in addition to the Hempel and Oppenheim paper for several reasons.
• First, it provides a very clear presentation of the “covering-law” model of explanation (an alternative label to “deductive-nomological model”).
• Second, I’ve assigned it after the Hempel-Oppenheim paper because it provides an occasion to consider one sort of objection to the D-N model. In particular, the claim that the explanation of particular events does not require general laws is not unlike one sort of objection to D-N model of explanations in science.
• And, finally, although this is not a course in the philosophy of history, we will be looking, much later, at the claim that biology, in particular, is fundamentally historical. So the question whether historical explanations are fundamentally different from scientific explanations is an important one for us.