| Phi 272 Fall 2013 |
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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.
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 (which is the deductive-nomological model under a different name).
• 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 historical 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 explanations in the natural sciences is an important one for us.