Teaching and Learning > DISCOURSE
Interview with Steven French
Author: David Mossley
Journal Title: Discourse
ISSN: 2040-3674
ISSN-L: 1741-4164
Volume: 6
Number: 1
Start page: 107
End page: 122
Return to vol. 6 no. 1 index page
Continuing our series of interviews with noted academics, David Mossley, History of Science and Philosophy of Science Subject Co-ordinator for the Subject Centre for Philosophical and Religious Studies, talked to Steven French about his international teaching career, his views on the interaction between history and philosophy of science, and his feelings on the changing state of higher education. The interview was conducted in Leeds on 20th July 2006.
Mossley: I wonder if we could begin with a little bit about your academic career to date, and how you got to where you are.
French: Like most people, I always think of my career as non-standard, but I think almost every person I meet in philosophy of science has had a non-standard career. Like many people working in this area, I came from a science background. I did a physics degree at Newcastle, which was very much applied physics oriented—their speciality was geophysics; Professor Runcorn, who taught there, was one of the big guys who did a lot of work on help and support for tectonic plate theory. As I was doing my degree, I became more and more interested in broadly philosophical, foundational issues. I had a really excellent tutor in quantum physics, we did stuff on high energy physics and all kinds of things, and he said, 'Go over to the philosophy department and talk to someone over there, and they might be able to tell you which way to go if you're interested in this stuff', so I did.
I spoke to this guy in philosophy, and he said, 'Well, there's Michael Redhead, he's really good in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, at Chelsea College, London, it's really the happening place, so you should apply there, do a PhD'. The PhD interview was completely bonkers! It was like nothing I'd ever experienced before—they had the whole department there, and they sat around me in a semicircle. Heinz Pose, Moshe Machova, Michael Redhead and John Dorling were there, all these people in history and philosophy of science, and they all just fired questions at me. John Dorling in particular paid no attention to whether anyone else was speaking, so in the midst of a question from one person, he'd fire another question. You'd have to spin around in your chair, answering all these questions. At the end I just thought, 'well, that's it, I've got no chance', but to my surprise they admitted me.
There were only two of us on the PhD programme that year, and it was an odd department because it was graduate-only, and it only accepted people with a degree in science. We had to spend the first year taking catch-up courses—basically a three year philosophy degree compressed into one year. We did classical logic, epistemology, philosophy of quantum mechanics, foundations of relativity theory—working eight hours a day on these courses for a year. That put us a year out of kilter with the research funding, which was for three years, and that meant at the end of the three years I hadn't finished my PhD. So we did the usual thing: I got jobs, firstly through Simon Saunders, who was also on the programme but a couple of years ahead of me, teaching in crammers for the sons and daughters of the rich and stupid, and also further education colleges in South London, basically doing whatever teaching I could to support me while I finished the PhD.
As I was coming to the end of the PhD, I started thinking, 'well, what next?' One afternoon, I got a phone call from Harvey Brown, who's now Professor at Oxford. He had finished his PhD the year I arrived, and had married a Brazilian woman and moved to Brazil, and he called up and said, 'Hey Steve, hope you remember me, it's Harvey Brown, how do you fancy working in Brazil?'. My wife and I just thought this was crazy, but he persisted and he called again, and he convinced us that this would be a really interesting experience. We were young, and we had no kids, so we thought 'yeah, ok'.
So we packed up our books and bits and bobs—we didn't have very much—and we moved to a town in Brazil about 100 km West of San Paulo, right on the tropic of Capricorn, called Campinas. I had a lectureship at the State University of Campinas, which was set up as a science and technology university, but had a great philosophy department, and a centre for logic and epistemology.
The physics department had a lot of applied research going on, they were doing early work on cosmic rays, for example, and we would get a lot of sort of refugees from physics, students who were interested in foundational problems, so we got these really bright, enthusiastic students, with a physics background like me, who'd come to do philosophy of physics.
Also, it was a very interesting time in Brazil, because the military government had just stepped down in favour of the first civilian president. He died under mysterious circumstances, and the vice president, José Sarney came in, so politically it was very interesting. When we got there, they had some elections, and the campaign for the elections was bizarre, they only showed a mugshot of the candidates on TV, with a short description and vague promises underneath, and that was it, and people were allowed to vote. Then they had local elections, and they had state elections, and within a year it was full of American-style razzle-dazzle electioneering, with money splashed over huge campaigns. Economically it was insane; in the second year we were there I think inflation reached 1000%, so it was a very odd cultural situation for us.
We made such good friends there, and if they hadn't screwed up our visas, requiring us to do this bizarre trip down to Paraguay, which was like the Wild West, to get new visas and come back in, we probably would have stayed there, because it was a very good university, very good students, and we had very good friends and neighbours. By the time we left, the economy was getting more balanced, and I thought Brazil would be a great place to live.
It was interesting philosophically, too, because Campinas and Sao Paulo were really the only two departments of Philosophy that were really analytically oriented in the whole of South America. All the others were really continental, so that meant we got a lot of interesting students from Venezuela, Mexico, and Argentina, who wanted to do analytic philosophy. There was an interesting mix of students, all postgraduates, post-docs, which made it a very exciting and fun place to be. We had seminars under these huge plane trees, talking about foundations of quantum physics, or philosophy of science, it was brilliant.
So after that, when it looked like we were going to have further visa problems, we decided to head back to the States, where my wife is from, and I did the round of APA meetings, trying to get a job. Meanwhile, I was teaching again, everything from high school physics to English to Vietnamese refugees, which was a lot of fun. I got offered a job at South East Missouri State University, which is a small, teaching only university, a very small department of only four or five people, but very committed and very bright. It was the only job I was offered, so basically I took it, and we moved to Missouri, where our son was born. After about three or four years, we began to feel like we'd like to move to a bigger city, we just felt that it was a very small town, only 35,000 people, outside of university circles and very conservative, and so I started looking for jobs again. I did the whole round again, got a bunch of interviews, thought I did fairly well and then every single position that I was in the running for was cancelled due to cuts in state funding, or at least that's what they told me, so it wasn't clear what we should do.
Then I saw an ad for a position at the University of Leeds, in fact in that year they were advertising five positions, and I decided to apply, on the off-chance that I'd get something, or at the very least I'd get a free trip back to England, and to my surprise they offered me the position here. That was in 1992, and I had to work out a year in South Missouri, so I arrived here in 1993.
So you came to philosophy of science with a physics background and an interest in quantum mechanics. What do you see as the relationship between philosophy and science, then, how do they fit?
When you're dealing with something like the foundations of quantum mechanics, or foundations of special relativity, you're dealing with something really deep and basic about our understanding of the world. Even if you're not a realist, you're dealing with something very profound about the kind of story we tell about how the world is, and it's absolutely crucial, if we are to have a true understanding of these theories, that we have a metaphysical and philosophical understanding of them. In some cases, some aspects of both theories, we're forced to—it's unclear, in the foundations of physics, sometimes, where the physics ends and the philosophy begins. Some physicists are tackling essentially philosophical questions, and some philosophers are tackling essentially physical questions, so some of my colleagues do very technical work that gets published in the physics journals. I'm more interested in the metaphysical issues, and in order to be able to answer questions like, 'What are quantum objects like?', or, 'Can quantum particles even be considered as objects?', you have to have some understanding of the metaphysics of objecthood, for example, you have to have some grip on philosophy. There's quite a complex interplay between the physics and the philosophy that's going to inform our understanding of the theory, so that's a relationship at that level.
In terms of the philosophy of science in general, I think the fundamental question in the philosophy of science is, 'How does science work?'. Here you have this cultural phenomenon that determines so much, so many aspects of our lives, and from this basic descriptive question, 'How does it work?', you can then go normative, and ask, 'How should it work? Is the way it's working the best way? Best for whom? Best for scientists, society, whatever?' But you need to get some grip on how it works, and to do that, that's where the philosophy of science comes in, you need to think about things like the science of discovery, justification, and how theories relate to evidence. I think that one of the most significant things about philosophy of science in the last 50 years is that we've moved away from quite simplistic pictures of how science works, where it's all to do with verifiability or falsifiability, we now recognise it's much more complex. Even the kind of picture you get from Kuhn, who I think is just so confused and obscure, is apparently simplistic, and we now recognise that there are much more complex relations between theories and evidence.
Some people have characterised the post-war period, as, in the words of a colleague of mine in Brazil, decadent—he thought that philosophers of science had become decadent, and were doomed to either splinter into a myriad sub-groups or cults, or just disappear entirely. I actually think it's more interesting, I think that philosophy of science has now recognised how complex science is, there are questions about whether one size fits all, whether one kind of philosophy of science fits all kinds of theories about physics and chemistry, and there's all kinds of interesting issues coming up.
So I think that it's a more interesting time to be doing philosophy of science, certainly than when I started. I think there are more interesting views out there, and a lot of good work has been done, from general philosophy of science down to foundations of quantum mechanics. You say that there's a great cultural importance to understanding the foundations of physics, particularly. Would you like to say a little more about that, in terms of wider culture and so on? I guess the usual story is, if there's one standard world, then we need to understand what physicists are telling us about the world, and we need to understand what quantum physics and space-time physics are telling us about the world, and that understanding has to be philosophically and metaphysically informed. Physicists may try and say that it's not, or it doesn't have to be, but it's impossible, they're going to use terms like 'objects', 'space' and 'time', all these sorts of questions come up, 'What are these points of space and time? Can they be individuated in some way or another?'; all these sorts of metaphysical questions. So insofar as understanding physics is important, the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of science in general is going to be important.
You've spoken about the change in the nature of philosophy of science over the last 50 years. How do you now see the relationship between philosophy of science and history of science? Because in a university context, they're becoming detached and separated, and this perhaps is returning to an earlier model of how the subjects work in university life, but how do you see the relationship?
As you know, we've held a workshop on the future of HPS , and there are going to be some international conferences at Pittsburgh and Notre Dame, which Hasok Chang, Don Howard, John Norton and I are involved in, looking at how history of science and philosophy of science interact; how they relate to each other. We've periodically returned to the nature of this relationship, perhaps without ever really resolving it.
There is a feeling that perhaps the history of science has become either aphilosophical or even anti-philosophical; that it's become heavily influenced by a certain kind of sociology that has pushed out philosophy and has even seen philosophy as somehow inimical to the history of science. I don't think it has to be that way, and I don't think it should be that way. I think the relationship is quite complex. I think that at one level, it's clear that the philosophy of science does use the history of science, or episodes from the history of science, as a kind of confirmatory data—it's hard to get away from that. If you have a theory, or you have a view of how science works, how are you going to defend that view? One way to defend it is to say, 'Well look, here's an example…', and you'll go to the history of science.
Then you come to the interesting issue of to what extent you're choosing the examples to fit your theory, to what extent are those examples infected already with a particular view of the philosophy of science? You can't get away from that, but I think in a sense you need to acknowledge that somewhat skewed relationship, and then move on. I think, although colleagues will probably disagree with me, history of science is probably better done when it's philosophically informed, or if not, at least when historians have an eye on some of the philosophical issues that arise. Particularly methodological issues, such as 'How does science progress?', or 'How were models constructed from these theories and how do they relate to the data?'. If history of science is to be more than a kind of low level, naïve kind of positivism where you just present the historical facts, it's going to have to at least touch on those kinds of questions.
So there is clearly a complex relationship between the two, and how that relationship works, without, say, the philosophers of science saying, 'Right, you historians, you're just there to provide me with data'. It's an interesting question: how does that relationship need to develop? The nature of what philosophy of science needs from history of science, and what historians of science might need from philosophers of science, has to be acknowledged, but we need to move on and, in my own view, the way to go forward is to focus on the idea that what we're doing here is representing scientific practice, and that there may be different modes of representation. There might be a historical mode and a philosophical mode, and these can be, as Hasok Chang puts it, complementary to one another, and they can be mutually supportive. I would like the professions to start focusing a little bit more on where they can be supportive, rather then emphasising where they diverge. Of course they do diverge naturally, but that doesn't mean that there aren't areas where they can converge and benefit both areas.
So how do you think that can that be reflected in teaching?
Well, it's a very sensitive topic. I think it's naturally reflected very crudely at introductory levels. In these post-Kuhnian times, every philosopher of science accepts that you have to present case studies, you have to present examples, and at level one those are always going to be crude, and probably will make historians blanch. There's not much you can do about that, you've got to get into the philosophical topics as well, but you can try to be minimally sophisticated about it, and as you go up to level two and three and so on, you can be more so. I would certainly hope that this is true of the HPS degree at Leeds—as you go up levels, the extent to which there's a mutual dependence between history of science and philosophy of science will become apparent to the student. I would hope that our students would not come out of a philosophy of science course with a very crude and naïve understanding of history of science and its relationship with philosophy of science, but rather, thinking, 'Well this is actually quite sophisticated, and quite complex'. It's not enough to say, 'Right, here's my theory of scientific progress, and I'm just going to give you these examples, from some crude and simplistic popular account of the history of 19th century physics', it's got to be more sophisticated than that, but we can't get into all the detail that historians of science might want to, because, frankly, some of those details are part of a representational mode that just isn't relevant to us.
A lot of your papers and books are co-authored or co-edited. This is a way of working which is quite common in the sciences, but isn't particularly common in the humanities. Are there any particular benefits you perceive from working in this way?
Yes, it's fun! One of my first papers was co-authored with Michael Redhead, but that was more a supervisor/student deal. Nevertheless, Michael came from a physics background, where it's much more common to do collaborative work—you do tend to find this in the philosophy of physics. Look at Harvey Brown's papers, or Chris Timpson's—quite often they're collaborative. It may be part of the nature of the subject that the best work is done when you're talking with someone and working through problems, sometimes quite difficult technical problems. Not everyone works in this way, there are colleagues in philosophy of physics and, obviously, in physics too, who work solo, but I think many people find that talking through a problem with someone else is beneficial. You get new insight, and then suddenly the issues start to shift and both of you has contributed.
It is also, in part, a simple matter of being in the right place at the right time. When I was in Brazil, I met this Brazilian logician, a very famous logician called Newton da Costa, and I had the honour of participating with him, collaborating with him, on a number of projects and papers. Newton da Costa is just a force of nature, one of these very charismatic individuals who can interest someone else in almost anything and everything, philosophically, scientifically, and logically. When he heard I was coming to Campinas he sent me a paper on a notion of pragmatic truth, a pre-print, briefly saying, 'You might be interested in this'. I sent him a note back, saying, 'Well actually this is quite interesting, it could be tied into issues in philosophy of science in the following way…' —I suppose it was because I was interested, but also because I thought it was the courteous thing to do—anyway, I got the feedback that he wanted to meet me. One day I was in a room in the centre of logic, and I heard this commotion down the hallway, a huge sort of noise, it sounded like a crowd of people. I was talking with an Italian logician, Diego Marconi, and I said, 'Jesus, what is that?', and he looked at me very solemnly and seriously, and said, 'That is the da Costa train, it is heading your way. And now Steven, you have a choice, you can choose to step back from the platform, and let the train sweep past you, or you can choose to get on board, but if you get on board, there's no getting off.' At that moment, dramatically, the doors burst open, and Newton da Costa came in with his entourage; (he always had an entourage of students) they poured into the room, and he said, 'Where is this Steven French, I must meet him!'. rushed over to me and shook me by the hand, and that was it: the next thing I knew I was collaborating with him. Every couple of weeks I'd get on the bus, get off in Sao Paulo, and go and spend a day with da Costa in his office, just talking about logic and philosophy of science, and each time it'd seem like we'd sketch out 10, 15 different papers, and I'd have to go and walk around San Paulo for a bit just to decompress. Then I'd get on the bus, come back, and we just started writing papers together, and I think that mode of working collaboratively, it's not for everyone, but if you have two enthusiastic, imaginative people willing to slightly, at times, subsume their own interests, but to work together to tackle a problem, to develop an idea, then it's just the best thing in the world—the greatest fun.
Do you encourage students to work collaboratively?
Yes, as I said it's not for everyone, some students do better than others, but I always try and do it with my students. This last couple of years I've had less time, because of admin stuff, than I used to, but I've worked collaboratively with Octavio Bueno, who was a student of Newton da Costa, and came here when I was here; with James Ladyman, I've continued to work collaboratively with him, writing papers together; with Angelo Cei, a current PhD student, we're just working on a paper together, and it's more fun. I think sometimes in philosophy you might feel trapped with your own thoughts, you're running round and round about a particular problem, and just to have someone else contributing is fresh, and it's interesting. You have to be flexible and perhaps give up on some thoughts that you have, or move in a slightly different direction to the one you had anticipated, but I just think that's more exciting, because quite often I look at the direction I'm going in and I know where it's going to end, and it's exciting to work with someone else who bumps you off that path and makes you go in a completely different direction.
Do you think undergraduates should work in this way?
That's an interesting question. I mean, that really depends on issues to do with psychology that I'm not really competent to look at. You have to be fairly secure in your own views, I think, to work this way, if it's to be a true, really equal partnership, and you're not just going to get swamped. The danger is that if you've got someone with a very strong will and very strong ideas, you just become the junior partner. I've seen that happen, in some cases, and it never works out well. One person is just really the junior add-on, and then resentment and hatred sets in; the next thing you know it's a crime scene. I think for final year undergraduates it's an interesting thing to try, and if we had the right kind of pedagogical framework, it would be interesting. Hasok Chang, for example, has done some interesting work at UCL with more collaborative group projects, and it would be interesting if we could do something like that in Leeds, I just don't know if we're set up to do that.
Right, and there are issues of assessment then, aren't there?
Yes, exactly.
So what do you think are the key abilities that a student needs to bring to a philosophy of science programme?
They need to have a critical stance. There are too many students who come into philosophy of science who either are positively in love with science, or have an axe to grind about it, and in both cases are unable to take the necessary step back and adopt a critical view of science. I don't agree with the policy that I was brought up under, which was that you had to have a degree in science—a number of people now don't have backgrounds in science—but what you do have to have is a real enthusiasm for science, a willingness to learn it, and then a kind of feel for it, for what science is about. Here's a slightly extreme case: Dean Rickles, who did a philosophy degree, with no background in science basically taught himself the technical details of quantum gravity, and is making a name for himself in the philosophy of physics. Now, Dean is remarkably energetic and tenacious, and spent hours and hours studying the technical details. Not everyone is like that, but you have to have something of that engagement, I think. I mean, the worst kind of HPS in general, or sociology of science, is done by people with only very superficial understanding of science, they look at something and think, 'Oh yes, that confirms the following kind of picture...' and that's it. You find professional people doing things like that, and it does everyone a disservice. You really have to have a love for science, and want to really understand it, and roll up you sleeves and get to grips with it.
OK, do you think the philosophy of science provides any particular abilities or skills? What particular skills do students develop during the course of studying philosophy of science?
The obvious thing that everyone is talking about, one of the current buzzwords, is interdisciplinarity. Philosophy of science is interdisciplinary by its very nature—you're looking at sometimes quite hard technical issues, but from a historical or a philosophical perspective—so you've got that ability. I know, from talking with students who have graduated in HPS, that employers, for example, value that. Here's someone who is not going to be fazed by difficult mathematical or technical details, but also has the kind of philosophy skills, including critical thinking skills, ways of representing and ways of constructing arguments, and also criticising arguments, that I think are extremely useful and valuable.
I agree, indeed. You've described how the context of your teaching has been quite diverse. How far do you think that your teaching itself has changed over the duration of your career, and has the nature of philosophy teaching changed within the university context?
In the philosophy of science it's changed here at Leeds, in that we used to teach what I rather dismissively called the history of the philosophy of science, and many people still teach it that way. If you taught the philosophy of science, you began with say the positivists, or maybe back further, Compte, Mach, then Popper, but in a very historical way, and I think there's been a bit of a shift towards more problem-oriented teaching, problems or themes, like theories and observations and so forth, and I think that's a good thing. Personally I want to get away from this idea that there's a canon, that these are the good books, these are the good philosophers. There are good philosophers, but my worry is that some people become hidebound and instead of thinking about the issues that actually need to be tackled, think about what Carnap would think about the issues that need to be tackled. There's been a lot of very interesting work done in the history of philosophy of science, and I think that's good if that's what you want to do, but that's not the philosophy of science. The philosophy of science is you thinking about the issues, and hopefully coming up with a new philosophy of science, so I think there has been a change in that way.
There has obviously been pedagogical change in how we deal with the students; how we try and improve the students' experience through tutorials. Although we all find the quality assessment procedures burdensome, I think it has to be admitted that in many cases, or at least in some cases, they have improved the quality of teaching. We're much more aware of how to teach more effectively and how to engage the students more effectively. In the old days, I can remember one teacher who would stand with his back to the class, facing the chalkboard, and mumble as he wrote up equations. When I did my physics degree, I was one of the students who marched down to the head of department's office to protest about a particular lecturer who was dreadful. I think those days have gone. I think there are far fewer incidences of bad teaching, thank goodness. We have a much more engaged approach, and I think that's all to the good.
What do you consider to be the most pressing factor driving change in philosophy of science? Not just in the UK, but internationally, both in teaching and research.
What sort of factors do you mean? External or internal to the profession?
Both.
We have the same external pressures as anyone else, particularly in this country, of producing papers for the RAE and of making sure our teaching's up to scratch with quality assurance. It's different internationally but they also have their own pressures.
I think internationally, worldwide, there are interesting things happening. For example, we're starting to see more and more interest in the philosophy of science in China. Everyone's talking China at the moment. China is the next big global economic power, and everyone, from OUP to the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, is talking about what happens when these Chinese universities get up to speed. I mean many of them already are, they're starting to produce good work in philosophy of science, starting to contribute to the journals and to produce their own PhD students, so it'll be very interesting to see how that will happen. You know, we talk about Anglo- American philosophy, Anglo-American philosophy of science, and there is quite a difference between the sorts of things we're interested in in the UK, and in the US, and even more so in say Germany or France, so what will it be like in China and India: what differences will we see? I think that's actually going to be very interesting. Internally, I think there is pressure to do something about the divide between history and philosophy of science. If that is addressed appropriately there could be some very interesting things resulting from that, and there could be a shift from both sides. We might see a whole new, relationship, or relationships, that have been hidden for too long, uncovered and brought back into the limelight.
Within the philosophy of science and the philosophy of physics, there are the usual pressures. Things have changed slightly in, say, foundations of quantum mechanics or space-time theory. I get the sense in some cases, not that it's exhausted, but that we're running pretty short of things to say about, say, the measurement problem, so the interesting issues are things like what for example Chris Timpson's working on, on quantum information theory, and quantum computation, quantum gravity.
This is a bit of a naked plug, but there's a book that Dean Rickles and Juha Saatsi and I are editing, where we've got philosophers of physics, and physicists, and a mathematician, John Baez, and Lee Smolin writing about the foundations of quantum gravity. Now some people are saying, 'Well, it's just too early to talk about the foundations of a theory that hasn't even been constructed yet,' but from Lee Smolin's point of view, and Baez's, it sounds a bit arrogant, but maybe we can shape the foundations of a whole new discipline, or contribute to the shaping of those foundations.
In quantum mechanics, say, the physicists did their work, and it's not true that they did that unphilosophically, if you look at Bohr's work, or even Heisenberg, but nevertheless, there's a feeling that they did their work in the '20s, and then philosophers came along afterwards and tried to make sense of this. Eddington had this famous quip about putting a sign up outside the physics department, 'Quantum theory, still under construction, no admittance to philosophers'. Now I can see that the last thing a physicist wants is a philosopher going, 'what about this equation?', but nevertheless, I don't think philosophy of physics should accept this position of coming along later, trying to make sense of what the physicists have done—I think there's an opportunity there for a very useful, mutually beneficial relationship between philosophers of physics, or certain kinds of philosophers, and certain kinds of physicists and mathematicians, where we contribute to the shaping of the foundations of, say, quantum gravity.
One last question, what would you say has been your greatest achievement as a philosophy teacher?
Ok, here are some achievements, not just in philosophy teaching but in teaching in general. When I taught at South London College of Further Education in Putney, I had to teach mostly kids who were out of work, or who had been out of work and were coming back to get some qualifications. I had to teach a remedial maths class to a bunch of kids who had no interest in maths, and these were pretty rough kids and they were very hard to teach, and I had to teach them basic stuff like long division. The one time I couldn't teach them, it was in the evening and I was giving a paper at the BSPS, so I left the class with a more experienced colleague, and a fight broke out and a student was knocked unconscious, chairs were smashed, it was like the Wild West, so I'm kind of proud that all the year that I taught them, there were no fights! Some of them were hopeless cases—teenage girls can be the hardest cases going, if they don't want to learn something—but a guy came up to me at the end of the course, and just thanked me, because as he put it, he was mathematically illiterate, but at the end of it, he wasn't scared by numbers, and I thought that was extremely touching. I just felt like I'd actually done something.
Likewise, I taught O-level physics to, again, teenagers who were out of work, and they went away, and then came back and got their Olevels, and I don't want to make it sound like I'm some kind of saint, but there was a huge sense of satisfaction in that. In the same kind of way, I taught Vietnamese refugees, and it was easy teaching, because they were so willing to learn, and we had so much fun. It was helped by the fact that they had a huge respect for all of us as teachers, that was part of the culture, but it was massive fun, and at the end of it, they took us all out, cooked us this fantastic Vietnamese meal, and gave us all presents, and then they went out into the wide world, so those are the ones that I remember.
In terms of philosophy of science teaching, I think we've changed the way philosophy of science is taught, at Leeds, and I'm proud of that. I think I've got students now who I remember coming in during the first year, really not having any idea how science works or what the module was going to be about and just getting really turned on by the philosophy of science, and going on to do an MA. That gives you a great sense of fulfilment. Likewise with MA students, they write a dissertation, go on to get on a PhD programme somewhere, get jobs. PhD students like James Ladyman, now a reader at Bristol, or Dean Rickles, post-doc in Canada—it's fantastic, that's what it's all about.
Thanks very much Steven.
Thank you.
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