Departmental Seminars

Seminars take place on Thursdays from 3.30pm to 5pm in Seminar Room 2 (unless otherwise stated).

Organised by Ahmad Elabbar.

Michaelmas Term 2026

22 October: Third Annual Mary Hesse Lecture

Framing inquiry

Catherine Z. Elgin (Harvard University)

Maybe science is grounded in first principles. Maybe they will be reflected in the end of inquiry. But actual science starts in medias res. A scientist conducts her research against a background of established findings by using available epistemic resources. When, as is often the case, these prove inadequate, she has to refine, retool, correct, and augment them to fit them to address that problem at hand. Her conceptual resources are flexible and versatile. Many take the form of felicitous falsehoods. Representations that are not strictly true are effective when their divergences from truth foster inquiry. In such cases it is not just despite but because they diverge from the literal truth that they embody and advance understanding.

The lecture will be held in the Old Divinity School at St John's College. It will be followed, at 5.00–6.30pm, by a drinks reception in the Whipple Museum.

29 October

Ethnography as a method for philosophers: conceptualising emotions in medical enquiry

Helene Scott-Fordsmand (University College London)

Philosophers of science are increasingly drawn to the use of empirical methods – from digital humanities to historical archival work. In this talk I make the case for ethnography as a fruitful method for philosophers. First, I outline varieties of existing uses of ethnography by philosophers more broadly under the term 'ethnographic philosophy'. I then motivate the use of ethnography for philosophers of medicine specifically with an example where ethnographic work helped re-conceptualise emotional norms in medical practice.

By closely observing and documenting day-to-day practices in orthopaedic surgery, we gain access to emotional routines and norms that are not readily available or easily captured in written sources. These ethnographic insights enable us to challenge the dominant conceptualisation of emotional norms in science and medicine as pertaining to individuals and their ability to foster or suppress particular types of emotions (e.g. 'curiosity' or 'anger'). Instead, we start to see emotions as part of a complex and fluctuating system of bodily rhythms, architecture, intersecting clinical and bureaucratic aims, and practical means and ends, and emotional norms as a matter of attunement more so than prohibition. Showing how these arguments arise from the embodied and embedded nature of ethnographic methods, I argue that ethnography is particularly well-placed when philosophers want to maintain the messy, material, and complex aspects of their subject matter.

5 November

The revolutions that never happened: Second Industrial Revolutions, the Scientific Revolution and the Scientific-Technical-Revolution, 1900–1970

David Edgerton (King's College London)

While historians might debate the usefulness of the concept of the Scientific, Industrial, Chemical and other revolutions, some have simply been wiped out, both by historical processes and by historians. Inspired by a remark by Eric Hobsbawm I will show how science-based Second Industrial Revolutions tend to be found in the present, obliterating previous ones. But I also show, following Ernst Homburg, that the post-war Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Scientific Revolution, or the Scientific-Technical-Revolution, disappeared by being pushed into the past, the first to the late 19th century, the second to the 17th, with only the last remaining part of the canon.

12 November

Small pharma chronicles: the curious tale of Indian generics

Sarah Hodges (King's College London)

Within the moral landscape of global pharmaceuticals, the past few decades have seen Indian generic drugs hold a series of potent material and affective charges. The access-to-medicines movement embraced the Indian generic as a cheap and effective life-saving object: a global south David against the Goliath of big pharma. Yet soon thereafter, others – whether regulators from Global South nations, or World Health Organisation taskforces – warned that, far from being life-saving, cheap drugs from India potentially posed an urgent danger to the entire global pharmaceutical supply chain. Today, many Indian generics have so consolidated their positions as lucrative global commodities that they have ceased to be Indian owned at all. 

This shifting material and affective charge of Indian pharma storytelling has left a spectacular contemporary archive of polemic: of campaigns and counter-campaigns. But polemic-as-archive presents a navigational challenge to the scholar. Although select main characters and moral imaginaries are rendered hyper-visible, many others thrive in the shadowlands of small pharma. This talk is an initial attempt to sketch out some of the characters that small pharma brings into view when used as an analytic lens for the curious tale of Indian generics and its shadowlands.

19 November

Neutrinos in Peru: environments and responsibilities in cosmic research

Jaco de Swart (University of Cambridge and Leiden University)

Studying the universe has earthly consequences. Cosmic research infrastructures depend on precious resources, build on extractive histories, and take up fragile land – be it pristine Antarctic ice or arid deserts in the Global South. In this talk, I discuss how the search for cosmic invisibilities has depended on, and impacted, its social and natural surroundings. In the first part, I discuss the history of the search for invisible neutrino and dark matter particles since the 1980s, and how environments have become important actors in the success of such experiments. In the second part, I ask what it would take to better integrate social and environmental responsibilities in this type of research. I discuss my involvement in TAMBO, a planned 'neutrino observatory' in the Peruvian Andes – a region known for its pre-Inca rooted inhabitants, condor habitats, and illegal mining activities. How can the inclusion of humanities scholars in the collaboration help integrate care and responsibility in a physics project from the start? I reflect on the progress of our experimental collaboration, including our first field visit, where Andean cosmologies met those of the involved physicists.

26 November 

The Black androids: history and the technological underground

Edward Jones-Imhotep (University of Toronto)

This talk lies at the intersection of two histories. It explores the place of steam, clockworks, and electricity in the technological history of 19th- and early 20th-century New York City. And it sets that history against a largely unexplored history of the 'Black androids' – a collection of racialised automata, built around these same technologies, that form part of the intersecting histories of slavery, automation, rebellion, science fiction, and artificial intelligence. Created globally in the hundreds between the mid-18th and the late 20th centuries, these machines have been almost completely absent from traditional histories of science and technology, obscuring their place in the combined technological and racial imaginaries of the modern period. In the context of 19th- and early 20th-century America, the Black androids extended a culture of minstrelsy, concentrated along Broadway. Using the advanced technologies of the time, these American androids portrayed Black people in pastoral, leisurely, and non-technological roles, supporting the myth of Black technological disingenuity. The androids' surface, however, masked how those same technologies featured centrally in the lives, imaginations, and self-identities of Black New Yorkers. The talk examines this duality: how the very technologies that drove the androids' racial caricatures also figured centrally in the lives, imaginations, and selfhood of Black New York. From 19th-century steam-men and railway sabotage plots, to electrical workers and the Harlem Renaissance, the talk asks what a descent into the technological undergrounds might reveal about race and machines, about the challenges of history, and about the role of unexplored episodes in challenging our conceptions of technology and pointing us towards new approaches.