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Department of History and Philosophy of Science

 

Seminars take place on Thursdays from 3.30pm to 5pm in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, unless otherwise stated.

Organised by Rosanna Dent.

Lent Term 2025

23 January

PhD Showcase

This showcase of five-minute flash talks will give a lively and swift overview of ongoing research by HPS PhD students.

30 January

Katherine Furman (University of Liverpool)
Pulling away from science, epistemic self-reliance, and the tale of Thabo Mbeki

When relations between science and society are going well, members of the public can straightforwardly use scientific information in their decision-making. When things go awry and trust breaks down, people seek out substitutions to fulfil the epistemic functions that trust in science previously satisfied. One way to do this is to adopt a DIY approach and 'do your own research'.

Plenty has been written philosophically on the phenomenon of 'doing your own research', mostly from and about north American and western European contexts. The implied epistemic agent is typically someone who values autonomy in the extreme, is deluded about their own capacities, has a contrarian character, and may enjoy the novelty of figuring things out for themself. However, if we change the cases, 'doing your own research' may look different.

In this talk, I provide a detailed case study of Thabo Mbeki and his AIDS denialism. Thabo Mbeki was South Africa's president from 1999 to 2008, and when he began his political career, he completely accepted the mainstream scientific position on HIV/AIDS. However, Mbeki began to distrust this science as he came to suspect that it was premised on racist values. He engaged in substantial independent evidence-gathering and developed AIDS policies on that basis, with tragic consequences. Mbeki's story is undoubtedly a cautionary tale against 'doing your own research', but he is far-removed from the parody of an autonomy-obsessed agent, dabbling in science for the fun of it. He is deeply invested in the success of his country and its people, and he takes this role extremely seriously. In fact, it seems that it is the seriousness of his commitments that lead him astray.  

Overall, this talk hopes to provide a slightly different story about 'doing your own research'. It also aims to highlight how the selection of cases for philosophical analysis can substantially alter how we understand the phenomenon under study, and so choosing cases should be approached with care.

6 February

Matthew Eddy (Durham University)
Recalculating equality: data, race and environmental health models in 19th-century West Africa

This paper examines the relationship between data and disease in the mid-19th-century British colony of Sierra Leone through the eyes of the black physician James Africanus Beale Horton (1835–1883). A native of Sierra Leone and a distinguished graduate of two British medical schools, Horton sought to arrest the alarming ascent of racialised medical information gathering systems that framed the delivery of public health and wellness for both African and European inhabitants who lived across the 3,000 miles of West African coastline controlled by Britain. Concentrating on the historical context that enabled Horton to use his robust knowledge of medicine, environmental science and statistics to promote health equity within British West Africa and within the Global South more generally, I suggest that he was especially keen to challenge the proliferation of incomplete, inaccurate or irrelevant medical information by collecting and disseminating climatology and mortality 'counter data' that revealed the true causes of health and illness.

13 February

Jim Secord (HPS, Cambridge)
Science as communication

Science is a form of communication, but its analysis from this standpoint has often been fragmented between diverse approaches and specialties, from textual criticism and media sociology to book history, citation analysis and translation studies. As a result, work not devoted to these subjects often implicitly treats the communicative dimension of science as an afterthought, managed after the main work is done. This talk aims to bring communication to the centre of our understanding of science. My goal is not to offer a unified overview of the vast literatures on pragmatics, translation, visual culture, the philosophy of linguistics and other areas, but to point to practical perspectives that might help in interpreting science at every stage as communicative action.

20 February

Miriam Solomon (Temple University)
On conceptual engineering in psychiatry: is it time to eliminate or reappropriate the category of psychiatric disorder?

The concept of psychiatric (mental) disorder became widespread in the late 20th century, as a sometimes literal, sometimes metaphorical, extension of the more general category of physical disease. It has facilitated medicalization of some psychological conditions, such as those listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM). At the same time, it has generated controversy about the scope and consequences of its applicability. 'Psychiatric disorder' has become a 'hembig' concept: one with normative (hegemonic) content, ambiguous meanings, and wide (big) scope. This has led to ongoing uncertainty and disagreement about what falls under the scope of psychiatric disorder. Many proposed definitions are circular. Practical consequences of these 'hembig' characteristics include inappropriate stigmatization, patient refusals of diagnoses, uncertain eligibility for healthcare and disability accommodations, concerns about overdiagnosis, and worries about elite capture of resources. I will argue that understanding the evolving meaning of 'psychiatric disorder' is helpful as a preliminary to recommendations about how to go forward with (or without) this concept.

27 February

Neil Safier (Brown University)
Where is Amazonia on display (today)? A global approach to understanding Amazonian collections

Over the past several decades, significant changes have taken place in the way that the Amazon River region has come to be understood across a range of disciplines. In the field of anthropology, interventions by anthropologists Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, as well as Indigenous knowledge-keepers including Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Ailton Krenak, have transformed the academic (and public) understanding of how Amerindian communities perceive and describe their own histories in equatorial South America, and beyond. Amazonian archaeology, in the work of Anna Roosevelt, Eduardo Neves, and Denise Schaan, among many others, has likewise revealed new ways of understanding the relationship between physical remnants of communities past and the longer histories of habitation and engagement within the vast and diverse Amazonian ecosystem. Even more recently, Amazonian artists from Peru to Venezuela and Brazil have engaged in a creative and politically ambitious rethinking of colonialism within the broader Amazon basin, presenting their work at venues from Braunschweig to Vienna and from Princeton to Venice. And mega-exhibitions like that of Sebastião Salgado's 'Amazonia' or the even more recent 'Amazonias: El Futuro Ancestral' (CCCB, Barcelona) have helped bring the visual lexicon of Amazonian rivers, forests, and communities to even more global audiences.

Today, Amazonia is being presented and displayed like never before in its history: in the news media, in scholarly books and publications, in museums, in political discourse, and in visual art. How are we to understand this visibility historically, especially through the presence of Amazonian objects and collections in museums and art exhibitions, and given the multidisciplinary and transgeographical nature of the region? What historically have been considered the confines of 'Amazonia' as a concept and what kinds of discourses exist that place different kinds of objects, works of arts, and histories together under a single category of 'Amazonia' today? This presentation aims to present the broad outlines of an interdisciplinary research project that will examine Amazonia historically, materially, and ideologically in museum collections around the globe. As digital repatriation comes to be better understood, what role/place/function does it have for the Amazon River region in particular? How do these politics change across the range of media, across geographical frontiers, and distinct legal and ethical regimes of this megaregion? As we contemplate these questions, are there particularly good scholarly models we can use to understand the historical processes of collecting Amazonia in the present day?

6 March: Cambridge Lecture in the History of Medicine

Keith Wailoo (Princeton University)
Unnecessary sleep: opium, the trial of Ann, and the therapeutic dilemma of slavery

As global opium markets expanded in the 19th century, the drug presented a deep therapeutic dilemma. Valued for vanquishing pain and inducing sleep, opium also heightened fears about its habit-forming capacity. Prized amid recurring cholera epidemics, opium products also provoked worry over their capacity to poison and kill. This talk – previewing my next book – examines a single murder trial of an enslaved girl in 1850 Tennessee, accused of using opium to kill the infant child of her master. At issue in the case was her knowledge of the uses and misuses of laudanum, an opium concoction. The case sheds light on an unexplored aspect of the nineteenth-century opium dilemma – the interplay of vital need and fear of poisoning as manifest in the context of US slavery. The case also illuminates how the courts waded into this therapeutic dilemma – how law and medicine interacted in adjudicating questions of knowledge, intent, culpability, and the maintenance of social order as opium found its way onto the North American slave plantation.

13 March

Venue: Seminar Room 2, Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Ekaterina Babintseva (Purdue University)
Creativity for the information age: making up minds and machines in the United States and the Soviet Union

In the mid-20th century, the United States and the Soviet Union came to believe that the future of each country hinged on capable technoscientific workforce. To cultivate such workforce, researchers in both countries suggested using special pedagogical computers, which were seen as more effective instructors than human teachers. At the same time, in the 1960s and the 1970s, both American and Soviet societies saw the rising urgency of the concept of creativity, defined as the capacity for technoscientific ingenuity. This talk begins by examining how researchers in the US and the Soviet Union approached the task of turning the computer, a rule-bound machine, into the instrument of cultivating creative thinking. In doing so, scholars employed formal approaches to modelling human reasoning developed by artificial intelligence (AI) practitioners and cognitive scientists in the US and the USSR. Pedagogical computing, therefore, became the site where many approaches to AI were tested and perfected. Eventually, some researchers involved in pedagogical computing turned to artificial intelligence research, where they sought to replicate computationally what they had come to define as the core of human intelligence. This talk treats US and Soviet pedagogical computing as converging efforts in optimizing and managing human cognitive resources under late capitalism and late socialism. Tracing the lineage between pedagogical computing and artificial intelligence in the US and the USSR, I demonstrate how in both countries, artificial intelligence was a managerial science of cognitive resources predicated on state and industry efforts to mold societies with science and technology.