My work in history and philosophy of science is most often connected to reasoning about evidence, principles of methodology, and theory choice. I tend to use historical examples from astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology to illustrate or motivate my work in these areas. I was the first philosopher to give extended attention to the dark matter problem in astrophysics.
The two areas in the history of science I am most interested in are the Copernican Revolution (Aristotle to Newton) and 20th-century astrophysics/cosmology.
Some of my work in the history and philosophy of science is linked here:
Vanderburgh, William L. (in progress) “Multi-Messenger Metaphysics: Evidence and Inference in Astrophysics and Cosmology.”
Vanderburgh, William L. (in progress) “The First Twenty Years of Philosophy of Dark Matter.”
Vanderburgh, William L. “Quantitative Parsimony, Explanatory Power and Dark Matter,” Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 45.2 (2014), 317-327.
Vanderburgh, William L. “On the Interpretive Role of Theories of Gravity and ‘Ugly’ Solutions to the Total Evidence for Dark Matter,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 47 (2014), 62-67.
Vanderburgh, William L. “Putting a New Spin on Galaxies: Horace W. Babcock, the Andromeda Nebula, and the Dark Matter Revolution,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 45.2 (May 2014), 140-159.
Vanderburgh, William L., and Martin Ratcliffe. “Ask me about ISON: The Risks and Rewards of Teaching an Interdisciplinary Honors Course on a Scientific Event as it Unfolds in Real Time,” Honors in Practice, 10 (2014), 27-35.
Vanderburgh, William L. “Theory Choice in the Historical Sciences: Geology as a Philosophical Case Study,” The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. Gary D. Rosenberg, Geological Society of America Memoir, 203 (2009), 255-264.
Vanderburgh, William L. “The Methodological Value of Coincidences: Further Remarks on Dark Matter and the Astrophysical Warrant for General Relativity,” Philosophy of Science, 72.5 (December 2005), 1324-1335.
Vanderburgh, William L. “The Dark Matter Double Bind: Astrophysical Aspects of the Evidential Warrant for General Relativity,” Philosophy of Science, 70.4 (October 2003), 812-832.
Vanderburgh, William L. Dark Matters in Contemporary Astrophysics: A Case Study in Theory Choice and Evidential Reasoning , PhD dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2001.
Vanderburgh, William L. “Empirical Equivalence and Approximative Methods in the New Astronomy: A Defense of Kepler Against the Charge of Fraud,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 27 (November 1997), 317-336.