1. The problem of the foundation of knowledge in antiquity (the Presocratics and Socrates; Plato and Aristotle; Stoics and Epicureans)

2. The Middle Ages
(Adelard of Bath, Robert Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Nicholas of Autrecourt)

3. The Scientific Revolution
(Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Giordano Bruno and Nicholas of Cusa; Galileo; Newton)

4. Modern Philosophy
(Francis Bacon's empiricism and René Descartes' rationalism; John Locke; George Berkeley; David Hume's criticism of induction; Immanuel Kant's a priori synthetic judgements)

5. The 19th Century
(Auguste Comte and Positivism; Richard Averarius and Ernst Mach, John Herschel, John S. Mill and William Whewell; Poincaré's and Duhem's conventionalism)

6. The 20th Century
(The "crisis of physics" at the turn of the century; Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus; Logical Positivism and the criterion of meaning; Karl Popper and Fries' trilemma: from falsification as a criterion of demarcation to the proposal of methodological rules; the "new philosophy of science" and the role of history: Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend)