Jan 4, 2010

About the Scientific Method

As a part of preparations for the IPO, we must learn to dabble with the prominent (albeit somewhat simple) issues from different areas of philosophy; the objective being to hone your skills in following & presenting philosophical arguments. Most of January we will spend on issues in the Philosophy of Science.
We already saw things about the scientific method and Kuhn's observations on the paradigms in science. Some may argue that the scientific method is not so well defined or that inductive thinking is not as well constrained as reasoning & logic, but works quite well. On this note comment on the following:

  1. Role of inductive reasoning in creating an hypothesis


  2. Is Ockham's razor justified, i.e. can it be used with certainty


  3. Is the scientific method rigidly followed? Should it be?

You may find Wikipedia very helpful along with maybe this link - http://www.sciencebuddies.org/

About the Indian Philosophy Olympiad aka the Abhinav Philosopher

Hi all,
The Abhinav Philosopher competition was held for the third consecutive year in the month of December, by the team of teachers from Abhinav Vidyalay & Jr. College. Details of the competition and its results are available online. The results are published for the 40 odd students who had attempted the essay, which carried significant weightage. We had called upon about 300 schools mostly near Mumbai & Pune and some well known schools from the rest of the state. There were about 104 entries mostly from around Dombivli, some from Mumbai (Lilavatibai Poddar, St. John Cathedral, ...) and a surprising entry from Haryana (shows the power of the net)
Most were students from std 10th to 12th, however some of the std 9th students also did quite well. Many essays and subjective answers were quite thoughtful which shows that the students were capable of thinking hard about issues completely outside their curriculum. Thats why the stage was called as 'Open-Your-Mind'. the jury had a harrowing time trying to reach an agreement about the winner and the excellence awards for this competition. I can safely say that in the end, justice was served.
The chosen ones - Chitra Adkar & Prathamesh Kubal will now proceed for training, initially through this blog and whenever possible, through lectures and discussions. Around mid-March, they will begin a rigorous training involving reading through a lot of material and writing quite a few essays. This training will reach its peak after mid-April when we train about 10-12 hours a day with intense brainstorming about various issues. The dates of the IPO 2010 are yet to be announced, but it should be somewhere in mid-May.

All other students, regardless of their score, are welcome to be a part of this training, in whatever way possible. For details they can contact me at 9819024442 or director@abhinav.ac.in. I expect those who couldn't make it into the team this year and will not be joining university next year to join these sessions and improve their skills.

Dec 5, 2009

Abhinav Stars Online

Hello everybody,
I have put up the tasks for the interschool Abhinav Stars on the net. Please go to the concerned web pages or lookup the Stimulus Home page. Deadline for returning the solutions either hand-writ (to our office by post of in person) or by email to admin@abhinav.ac.in is 9th Dec, by 4 pm
  1. Abhinav Scentist
  2. Abhinav Philosopher
  3. Abhinav Designer