Seminars take place on Thursdays from 3.30pm to 5pm in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre.
Organised by Ahmad Elabbar.
Lent Term 2026
22 January – Cambridge Lecture in the History of Medicine 2026
Dora Vargha (University of Exeter and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Communist M*A*S*H: life, death and politics at a Hungarian field hospital in North Korea
With the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, bringing together most of Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, Mongolia and China, a loosely coordinated medical aid to North Korea laid foundations for a new cooperation for countries that found themselves outside of the new, liberal international order. Medical missions physically connected newly established socialist worlds as doctors, nurses and technicians travelled 15,000 km over land, air and sea, through Moscow and Beijing; established close professional and personal relationships with other eastern Europeans on site, with Korean, Chinese and Russian colleagues; and engaged in a common, revolutionary world-making through shared experiences of shortages and ideas of fraternity. Based on extensive research on the Hungarian mission to North Korea between 1950 and 1957, through the everyday life of the field hospital this paper considers complex relationships between war and health, the challenges hospitals face in war zones, and the mobilisation of ideologies and geopolitics in the justification of conflict – and networks of solidarity.
29 January
HPS PhD Students' Showcase
Featuring: Tvrtko Vrdoljak, John Schaefer, Charlotte Stobart, Solomon Hajramezan, Scott Partington, Johanna Silva-Stüger, Jason Guo and Jules Macome
5 February
Alex Wellerstein (Stevens Institute of Technology)
The secret causes of the Castle Bravo accident
The Castle Bravo nuclear weapons test, in March 1954, was the worst radiological accident of the United States nuclear testing program, contaminating tens of thousands of square miles of the territory of the Marshall Islands, including several inhabited atolls, and exposing nearby Marshallese, American observers, and the crew of a Japanese fishing boat to harmful levels of radioactive fallout. Despite being a fixture of both popular and scholarly interest for the past 70 years, the underlying cause of the accident has only very recently been understood. The official explanations – that a change in wind conditions, coupled with an unexpectedly high-yield – are now known to have been incorrect and even deliberately misleading. Documents and reports declassified and released in the last decade or so in fact point to an entirely different cause of the accident: a fundamentally flawed and unsubstantiated theory of how fallout would form for megaton-range weapons. In this talk, I will focus on 'what went wrong' in the Bravo accident, what impact different causative mechanisms do to our historical (and possibly legal) narratives about the accident, and, ultimately, the practices of Cold War knowledge production that were arguably the ultimate 'cause' of the accident.
12 February
Jessie Munton (University of Cambridge)
Permission to know
In this talk I will argue for what I call the 'Permission View' of knowledge. According to the Permission View we need others' permission in order to know: social permission is partially constitutive of knowledge. Whilst work from various sources outside analytic epistemology speaks in favour of this view, in this talk I argue for it on the basis of a set of pressures which arise from within accounts of knowledge offered by analytic epistemology. Focusing in particular on the discussion of pragmatic encroachment, and knowledge norms of assertion and action, I argue that we see the analytic epistemologist fire-fighting against a set of difficulties which can be better accommodated by giving up the individualism of standard analyses of knowledge in favour of the more radically social approach offered by the Permission View. I then go on to explore and defend some of the controversial implications of the view.
19 February
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (Columbia University)
Chronic nation: the politics of experts, health and making modern Indian citizens (1940–70s)
Kavita Sivaramakrishnan's talk will trace debates about chronic diseases and questions of modernization in post-colonial India. She will explore the politics of experts and expertise, and how questions of immunity, the risks of stress and adaptability to modernization became significant, and new medical specializations and knowledge emerged and were recast in India in the context of work, lifestyles, and local metabolisms.
26 February
Stephan Guttinger (University of Exeter)
AI, automation, and the problem of error in science
Science is rapidly moving towards a more automated future. Whilst this is not an entirely new phenomenon – automation in science has been around for at least 150 years – recent years have seen an increase in talk about, and implementation of, automated workflows. This drive for more automation is particularly prominent in laboratory-based disciplines such as material sciences, chemistry, and the life sciences. The core aims that drive this push for more automation in the laboratory are 1) to increase research efficiency and 2) to improve the replicability of experimental outputs. In this talk I will analyse how these two aims are affected by the adoption of powerful new AI tools in science, with a focus on the life sciences. I will argue that whilst new AI capabilities, in particular the 'reasoning' abilities of large language models (LLMs), have the potential to boost the efficiency of research, they could have a negative effect on the replicability of scientific results. More specifically, I will argue that AI-driven automation (ADA) can reduce scientists' ability to troubleshoot the experimental process by diminishing their ability to identify, understand, and correct flawed research outputs. Two key implications of this analysis are 1) that the move from traditional automation to ADA needs to be managed in a context-sensitive manner which ensures that a laboratory's ability to deal with experimental error remains intact, and 2) that we need to develop a better understanding of error (and error-reasoning) in science in order to tackle implication 1).
5 March
Eric Winsberg (University of Cambridge & University of South Florida)
So friggin' likely: a public choice analysis of bureaucratic science
The COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing climate crisis have fundamentally challenged the traditional 'credit economy' model of science, revealing an institutional architecture driven less by disinterested truth-seeking and more by bureaucratic survival. This talk outlines a Public Choice Philosophy of Science (PCPS) – a framework that models scientific institutions and their 'scientist-bureaucrats' as rational actors responding to incentives for political influence, resource protection, and moral signalling.
12 March
Paul E. Griffiths (University of Sydney & Macquarie University)
Sex as a process
Biological sex is not determined at conception. This fact has been obscured by concentrating on humans and ignoring the many species in which individuals change sex during their life cycle, as well as the many species with non-genetic or facultatively genetic sex determination systems. In these species it is self-evident that sex is the outcome of a developmental process, a process that can take different paths in different circumstances. But the general point applies equally to humans. Human sex chromosomes cause sexual development to proceed down a particular pathway (other things being equal), but they do not constitute sex any more than nest temperature constitutes sex in crocodiles. In humans, just as in species with non-genetic sex determination, assigning sex to pre-reproductive life-history stages involves 'prospective narration' – classifying the present in terms of its predicted future. Sex is a process.
As a corollary to this view, the idea that an individual organism is male, female, hermaphrodite or neuter should be replaced by the more accurate idea that organisms have state-dependent sexual life-history strategies under which individuals manifest one or more sexes during specific life-history stages and depending on circumstances. This is the only view that can be consistently applied across the whole diversity of sexual species.
The paper concludes by comparing and contrasting this processual view of biological sex with other recent 'sex realist' theories in philosophy of biology.