Part III and MPhil timetable

Part III Manager: Richard Staley (Michaelmas & Lent Terms), Rosanna Dent (Easter Term)

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 Tuesday 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 (16 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 (23 October)

Staffan Müller-Wille: Race and history

Lettow, Susanne, 'Introduction', in Susanne Lettow (ed.), Reproduction, Race and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences (New York: SUNY Press, 2014), pp. 1–17
López Beltrán, Carlos, 'Hippocratic Bodies, Temperament and Castas in Spanish America (1570–1820)', Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 8 (2007), 253–289
Seth, Suman, 'Materialism, Slavery, and The History of Jamaica', Isis 105 (2014), 764–772

Week 3 (30 October)

Charu Singh: Scientific periodicals in global perspective

Elshakry, Marwa, 'When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections', Isis 101 (2010), 98–109
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 4 (6 November)

Marta Halina: Animal minds

Halina, Marta, Animal Minds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024)

Week 5 (13 November)

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 (2016), 18–28
Bangham, Jenny, 'Living Collections: Care and Curation at Drosophila Stock Centres', BJHS Themes 4 (2019), 123–147
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), pp. 167–184

Week 6 (20 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), chapter 2: 'Rigour', pp. 51–82
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 (2019), 1163–1228 (skim for general idea)

Week 7 (27 November)

Tom McClelland: Perceiving affordances for action

McClelland, Tom, 'The Mental Affordance Hypothesis', Mind 129 (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 8 (4 December)

Nick Hopwood: Serial knowledge

Hopwood, Nick, The Embryo Series: Imaging Human Development before Birth (book manuscript), selected chapters
Hopwood, Nick, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, 'Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century', History of Science 48 (2010), 251–285

Lent Term

Week 1 (29 January)

Michael Diamond-Hunter: Case studies and socially-salient concepts

Morgan, Mary, 'Case Studies' (chapter 15), in Nancy Cartwright and Eleonora Montuschi (eds), Philosophy of Social Science: A New Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 288–307
Bolinska, Agnes, and Joseph D. Martin, 'Negotiating History: Contingency, Canonicity, and Case Studies', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 80 (2020), 37–46
Morgan, Mary, 'Exemplification and the Use-Values of Cases and Case Studies', Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 78 (2019), 5–13

Week 2 (5 February)

Joshua 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 3 (12 February)

Philippa Carter: Diagnosing the dead

Cunningham, Andrew, 'Identifying Disease in the Past: Cutting the Gordian Knot', Asclepio 54:1 (2002), 13–34
Wilson, Adrian, 'On the History of Disease Concepts: The Case of Pleurisy', History of Science 38 (2000), 271–319
Cunningham, Andrew, 'Changing Disease Identity', episode 14 of BBC series The Making of Modern Medicine (2007)

Week 4 (19 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 (2017), 181–203

Week 5 (26 February)

Matt Farr: Does time have a direction?

Farr, Matt, 'C-Theories of Time: On the Adirectionality of Time', Philosophy Compass 15:12 (2020); preprint

Week 6 (5 March)

Rosanna Dent: Collecting humans

Qureshi, Sadiah, Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 'Transforming "Unfruitful Wonder"', pp. 185–221
Heaney, Christopher, 'Skull Walls: The Peruvian Dead and the Remains of Entanglement', The American Historical Review 127 (2022), 1071–1101
Radin, Joanna, 'Collecting Human Subjects: Ethics and the Archive', in Jenny Bangham, Xan Chacko and Judith Kaplan (eds.), Invisible Labour in Modern Science (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022), pp. 265–273