Philosophy of Science – Newcomer Survival Guide by Dr Rafaela Medeiros

Is the Kuhn-Popper debate relevant for your inner compass?

At Finec MGIMO we believe in long-term value of humanities as well as structured thinking and reasoning skills that philosophy provides. We are happy to have Dr. Rafaela Medeiros to share her insights and passion about Philosophy of Science and practicality of learning philosophy for today’s students.

In this interview:

• we discuss both the “yes” and “no” of whether philosophy of science is relevant today (0:36),
• peruse the Big Four authors of the discipline – Hume, Kant, Popper and Kuhn (8:45),
• investigate implications of the Kuhn-Popper debate for the 20th century (22:05), and
• talk a bit about what humans are bad at as a species.

Also check out reading suggestions from Rafa (26:45), and her solid advice on the importance of your inner compass and ways to calibrate it (33:00).

About our guest

Rafaela Medeiros is sociologist with a PhD In Business from EBAPE-Fundação Getúlio Vargas. Dr. Medeiros research interests are public policy, elections, causal inference and data science.

She has worked as a Consultant for UNDP at the Brazilian Ministry of Social Development, the National Institute of Applied Economics (IPEA/Brazil) and founded the Women in Machine Learning and Data Science Chapter in Rio (WiMLDS-Rio).