Part II primary source seminars

Overview

Seminars are held in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

Michaelmas Term

  • Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist
    Matt Farr
    Fri 10am (weeks 1–4)
  • The Sextant: Instruments and Documents in the Quest for Longitude
    Joshua Nall
    Fri 2pm (weeks 1–4)
  • Darkness in El Dorado
    Rosanna Dent
    Mon 10am (weeks 1–4)
  • Agnotology: The Tobacco Industry Documents
    Ahmad Elabbar
    Tue 10am (weeks 1–4)
  • Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1626)
    Lauren Kassell
    Wed 10am (weeks 1–4)
  • Théâtre D'opéra Spatial
    Tom McClelland
    Wed 2pm (weeks 1–4)

Seminars

Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist

Matt Farr (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

The Library of Living Philosophers is a long-running series of edited volumes dedicated to influential philosophers. That one such volume was dedicated to Einstein is testament to the philosophical significance of his work in the foundations of physics. This volume, edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp and coinciding with Einstein's 70th birthday, contains a collection of essays by leading philosophers and scientists covering concepts such as reality, measurement, and the nature of space and time, stemming from Einstein's physics. We will focus on key philosophical essays within the volume, Einstein's own replies to these, and the role of these debates in contemporary philosophy of science.

Source:

  • Schilpp, P.A. (ed.), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist – Library of Living Philosophers (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1951)
     

The Sextant: Instruments and Documents in the Quest for Longitude

Joshua Nall (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In this course we will consider what might be learned from the study of historic scientific instruments. Our subject is one of the defining instruments of the 18th century: the sextant, an ingenious device designed to aid navigation at sea. In seminar handling sessions we will use the collections of the Whipple Museum to analyse how sextants were made and used. We will then study a small collection of key texts relating to their invention and early use. This will bring the material culture of science into dialogue with a defining episode from British imperialism: the quest to find longitude at sea.

Sources:

  • Sextants from the Whipple Museum's collection
  • Documents from and relating to the Board of Longitude

Théâtre D'opéra Spatial

Tom McClelland (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In 2022, artist Jason Michael Allen submitted his picture Théâtre D'opéra Spatial to the Colorado State Fair art competition. After it won first prize in the ‘digital art’ category, it emerged that Allen created the picture using the AI image-generating platform Midjourney. This triggered a global controversy, with some condemning it as the death-knell of authentic art and others hailing it as the culmination of staggering advances in Machine Learning. The Théâtre D'opéra Spatial debacle raises a number of pressing philosophical questions. In particular, when an image like this is created who, or what, is doing the creating? According to an ongoing legal case brought against Midjourney, AI image-generating platforms are nothing but “21st century collage tools” that plagiarise the intellectual property of hard-working human artists. But according to advocates like Allen, users of these platforms are themselves artists who creatively coax images from the AI by entering the right prompts. A more dramatic possibility is that the AI itself is the real locus of creativity. An AI can only generate images thanks to what it learns from a body of existing images, but is this really so different to what a human artist does? Delving into a cluster of moral, aesthetic and metaphysical issues, this unit seeks to make sense of Théâtre D'opéra Spatial and the technological revolution that it represents. 

The focus of the unit will be on philosophical issues raised by the Primary Source. These include questions regarding authorship, creativity, ethical use of technology and the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Work in computer science regarding the workings of generative AI and in legal theory regarding copyright infringement are also relevant, but engagement with these fields is not required and will not be our focus. 

Sources:

Théâtre D'opéra Spatial 

Agnotology: The Tobacco Industry Documents

Ahmad Elabar (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

'Doubt is our product', declared a 1969 internal memo of the US tobacco giant Brown & Williamson, 'since it is the best means of competing with the "body of fact" that exists in the mind of the general public'. This memo describes one element of what has become known as the 'tobacco strategy': a strategy which deploys scientific expertise to render consumers and regulators ignorant of the harms of an industry's products, from cigarettes to fossil fuels. The field of agnotology – the systematic study of the production of ignorance – was born in part from efforts of historians and philosophers of science to understand the tobacco strategy. This seminar explores the insights and limits of agnotology, drawing on both historical and philosophical approaches. Students will first be introduced to specific documents in the digital archive of tobacco industry documents, made public as a result of litigation efforts across the world, and hosted by the University of California, San Francisco. Students will then be encouraged and guided to go beyond the selected documents and explore the archive independently, basing their essays on documents or media (e.g. tobacco television advertisements) they might discover, as much of the archive remains to be studied.

Source:

Francis Bacon, New Atlantis

Lauren Kassell (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

When Francis Bacon, lauded as the intellectual patron of the Royal Society and father of the scientific method, died in 1626, his papers included a brief, unfinished utopian fiction called New Atlantis. His chaplain, William Rawley, quickly oversaw its publication, paired with Sylva sylvarum, a hefty collection of observations and experiments. New Atlantis begins with a ship blown off course off the coast of Peru, whose crew arrive on the hidden (and imaginary) island of Bensalem. Taking the form of a first-person travel narrative, it tells the story of what these Spanish-speaking sailors, bit by bit, discovered about the ways in which life, and knowledge, were organised in this fabulous society. The account culminates with the narrator's introduction to Solomon's House, a research institution devoted to the systematic study of nature and the advancement of knowledge for human benefit. Solomon's House was quickly adopted as a model for collaborative natural philosophical inquiry and, ultimately, as a blueprint for state-sponsored scientific inquiry. It has been extensively studied for its historical and imaginative qualities. In recent years, it has become a key reference for the new breed of techbros as they position themselves as the heirs of Bacon's model of scientific progress. These seminars will explore what it meant for Bacon to write this work in 1620s England, why it matters that it was republished in the decades that followed, and how it has been read over the past four hundred years.

Source:

  • Francis Bacon, New Atlantis (1626)
    This text was originally published in Sylva sylvarum: or a natural history (London, 1626), STC 1168, a1r–g3v. It has been republished many times, most recently by David Colclough (ed.), New Atlantis, The Oxford Francis Bacon, XIX (Oxford University Press, 2025), pp. 1–44, with a substantial introduction and editorial apparatus.

Darkness in El Dorado

Rosanna Dent (4 seminars, Michaelmas Term)

In the year 2000, Patrick Tierney's journalistic exposé Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon sparked one of the most intense controversies in the history of anthropology. The book accused geneticists and anthropologists of serious ethical violations during research among Yanomami (Indigenous) communities along the border of Venezuela and Brazil. Its publication prompted international debate and institutional inquiries. While many of Tierney's claims were subsequently challenged and discredited, highlighting serious failings in his research methods, other concerns raised by the book remained unresolved and continue to prompt critical reflection. In the aftermath of the publication, Brazilian anthropologists protested that their longstanding concerns about research Tierney cited had been ignored by the US academy. Yanomami discovered that blood samples of their loved ones had been stored without their knowledge and consent, prompting a campaign for repatriation. Meanwhile, academic debates intensified around sociobiology and explanations of human behaviour that appealed to innate and evolutionary factors. Using Tierney's book and the surrounding controversy, we will examine issues of representation, biomedical and anthropological ethics, Indigenous rights under conditions of scientific colonialism, evidence and public trust in science, and the challenging, often ambiguous realities of conducting scientific fieldwork.

Source:

  • Tierney, Patrick, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000)

Resources for these seminars