"Science and Culture in Latin America is likewise a philosophy of science course, taught as an upper-level class at the University of Utah, but it is one that reorients this familiar starting point by foregrounding the philosophical significance of science's embeddedness with culture, power, and values. Although the course is interdisciplinary (it was cross-listed as a Spanish course and a History and Philosophy of Science course), its central questions remain philosophical:"
"Students encounter Iberian colonial science, Nahua medicine, and Mayan astronomy, not as marginal curiosities but as constitutive influences on "modern science" itself. The point is not to set up "alternative" sciences but to show how Indigenous knowledges and colonial practices shaped what we now call science. Here, Helen Longino's account of values in scientific communities and Sandra Harding's insistence on the cultural embeddedness of science provide philosophical frameworks for rethinking the very categories through which philosophy of science has often defined itself."
Science and Culture in Latin America is an upper-level course that reorients the positivist starting point by foregrounding science's embeddedness within culture, power, and values. The course is interdisciplinary and cross-listed, while central questions remain philosophical: what counts as scientific knowledge, how values shape inquiry, and how to understand scientific practices in colonial and Indigenous contexts. The syllabus examines Galileo, Kuhn, and the notion of the Scientific Revolution, then complicates that narrative by integrating Iberian colonial science, Nahua medicine, and Mayan astronomy as constitutive influences on modern science. Philosophical frameworks from Helen Longino and Sandra Harding support rethinking traditional categories. The syllabus then turns to literature and aesthetics, including Sor Juana.
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