Part III and MPhil timetable

Part III Manager: Richard Staley

MPhil Managers: Anna Alexandrova, Charu Singh

Part III and MPhil Lectures and Seminars

The HPSM MPhil/HPS Part III Lectures, which are mandatory for all students enrolled on these courses, will be held on Wednesdays from 3.00–4.30pm in HPS Seminar Room 2.

Students from other courses who wish to attend one of these lectures should obtain permission in advance from the lecturer.

Each lecturer will offer at least one follow-up discussion on their topic, for students who wish to discuss the subject in-depth with a smaller group. This discussion session will typically be held at 10.00–11.30am on Monday or Wednesday in Seminar Room 1. It will be capped at 14 participants; students must sign up for this session in advance on Moodle.

If more than 14 students wish to attend the follow-up discussion, the lecturer will make a second session available when possible.

Michaelmas Term

Week 1 (11 October)

Hasok Chang: Realism, relativism and pluralism

Chang, Hasok, 'Relativism, Perspectivism and Pluralism', in Martin Kusch (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Relativism (London and New York: Routledge, 2020), pp. 398–406
Chang, Hasok, 'Pragmatism, Perspectivism, and the Historicity of Science', in Michela Massimi and Casey D. McCoy (eds), Understanding Perspectivism: Scientific Challenges and Methodological Prospects (New York and London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 10–27

Week 2 (18 October)

Tom McClelland: Perceiving affordances for action

McClelland, Tom, 'The Mental Affordance Hypothesis', Mind 129:514 (2020), 401–427
Nanay, Bence, 'Do We See Apples as Edible?', Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 92 (2011), 305–322
Siegel, Susanna, 'Affordances and the Contents of Perception', in Berit Brogaard (ed.) Does Perception Have Content? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 39–76

Week 3 (25 October)

Stephen John: Is, can or should science be 'value-free'?

Douglas, Heather, 'Inductive Risk and Values in Science', Philosophy of Science 67 (2000), 559–579

Week 4 (1 November)

Josh Nall: Instruments and empires

Raj, Kapil, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), chapter 6 ('When Human Travellers become Instruments: The Indo-British Exploration of Central Asia in the Nineteenth Century', pp. 181–222)
Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim, Empire and the Sun: Victorian Solar Eclipse Expeditions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chapter 5 ('Astrophysics and Imperialism', pp. 121–143)
Anderson, Katherine, Predicting the Weather: Victorians and the Science of Meteorology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), chapter 6 ('Science, State and Empire', pp. 235–284)

Week 5 (8 November)

Philippa Carter: Diagnosing the dead

Cunningham, Andrew, 'Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot', Asclepio 54:1 (2002), 13–34

Week 6 (15 November)

Charu Singh: Scientific periodicals in global perspective

Baldwin, Melinda, Making Nature: The History of a Scientific Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 'Nature's Shifting Audience, 1869–1875', pp. 21–47
Csiszar, Alex, The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 'Introduction: Broken Pieces of Fact', pp. 1–21
Shen, Grace, 'Periodical Space: Language and the Creation of Scientific Community in Republican China', in Jing Tsu and Benjamin Elman (eds), Science and Technology in Modern China, 1880s–1940s (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 269–295

Week 7 (22 November)

Salim Al-Gailani: COVID-19 and the history of medicine

'Reimagining Epidemics', special issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine 94 (2020), esp. the introduction, 'Epidemics Have Lost the Plot' and 'Reconsidering the Dramaturgy'
Lachenal, Guillaume, and Gaëtan Thomas, 'COVID-19: When History Has No Lessons', History Workshop Online, 30 March 2020
Harrison, Mark, 'Pandemics', in M. Jackson (ed.), The Routledge History of Disease (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 129–46 (available on Moodle)

Week 8 (29 November)

Anna Alexandrova: Evidence-based policy and its discontents

Cartwright, Nancy, Jeremy Hardie, Eleonora Montuschi, Matthew Soleiman, and Ann C. Thresher, The Tangle of Science: Reliability Beyond Method, Rigour, and Objectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), ch. 2 ('Rigour')
Khosrowi, Donal, and Julian Reiss, 'Evidence-Based Policy: The Tension Between the Epistemic and the Normative', Critical Review 31 (2019), 179–197
Kohler-Hausmann, Issa. 'Eddie Murphy and the Dangers of Counterfactual Causal Thinking About Detecting Racial Discrimination', Northwestern University Law Review 113, no. 5 (2019), 1163–1228 (skim for general idea)

Lent Term

Week 1 (24 January)

Mary Brazelton: Histories of global health

Baum, Emily, 'Acupuncture Anesthesia on American Bodies: Communism, Race, and the Cold War in the Making of "Legitimate" Medical Science', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 95, no. 4 (2021), 497–527
Espinosa, Mariola. 'Globalizing the History of Disease, Medicine, and Public Health in Latin America', Isis 104, no. 4 (2013), 798–806
Anderson, Warwick, 'Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine', Social History of Medicine 27, no. 2 (2014), 372–84

Week 2 (31 January)

Matt Farr: Does time have a direction?

Farr, Matt, 'C-theories of time: On the adirectionality of time', Philosophy Compass 15, no. 12 (2020); preprint

Week 3 (7 February)

Dmitriy Myelnikov: Animal experiments

Ankeny, Rachel A., and Sabina Leonelli, 'Repertoires: A Post-Kuhnian Perspective on Scientific Change and Collaborative Research', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 60 (Dec 2016), 18–28
Bangham, Jenny, 'Living Collections: Care and Curation at Drosophila Stock Centres', BJHS Themes 4 (2019): 123–47
Kirk, Robert G.W., 'Care in the Cage: Materializing Moral Economies of Animal Care in the Biomedical Sciences, c. 1945–', in K. Bjørkdahl and T. Druglitrø (eds.), Animal Housing and Human–Animal Relations: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures (London: Routledge, 2016)

Week 4 (14 February)

Richard Staley: Defining climatic periods and making climate history

Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste, and Fabien Locher, 'Modernity's Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity', Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 579–598
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 'Anthropocene Time', History and Theory 57 (2018), 5–32
Antonello, Alessandro, and Mark Carey, 'Ice Cores and the Temporalities of the Global Environment', Environmental Humanities 9, no. 2 (2017), 181–203

Week 5 (21 February)

Marta Halina: Animal minds

Halina, Marta, Animal Minds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)

Week 6 (28 February)

Dániel Margócsy: Visual studies of science

Beaulieu, Anne, 'Images Are Not the (Only) Truth: Brain Mapping, Visual Knowledge, and Iconoclasm', Science, Technology & Human Values 27:1 (2002), 53–86
Daston, Lorraine, 'Epistemic Images', in Alina Payne (ed.), Vision and Its Instruments. Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe (University Park, PA: PSU Press, 2015), pp. 13–35
Latour, Bruno, 'Drawing Things Together', in Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (eds), Representation in Scientific Practice (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 19–68