Part III and MPhil timetable

Part III students' guide

MPhil students' guide

Part III Manager: Richard Staley (Michaelmas & Lent Terms) Stephen John (Easter Term)
MPhil Managers: Anna Alexandrova and Staffan Müller-Wille

Part III and MPhil Lectures and Seminars 2022–23

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 Michaelmas Term they will be held in the Hopkinson Lecture Theatre on the New Museums Site.

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 HPS 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 (12 October)

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 2 (19 October)

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 3 (26 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 4 (2 November)

Anna Alexandrova: Evidence-based policy and its discontents

• Deaton, Angus, and Nancy Cartwright, 'Understanding and Misunderstanding Randomized Controlled Trials', Social Science & Medicine 210 (2018), 2–21 (read sections 1 and 4 carefully, the rest can be read selectively)
• 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)

Week 5 (9 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 6 (16 November)

Tim Lewens and 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 7 (23 November)

Philippa Carter: Diagnosing the dead

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

Week 8 (30 November)

Jacob Stegenga: The sciences of sexual desire

• Lloyd, Elisabeth, 'Pre-Theoretical Assumptions in Evolutionary Explanations of Female Sexuality', Philosophical Studies 69 (1993), 139–153
• Stein, Edward, The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), introduction and chapter 7
• Stegenga, Jacob, Book Synopsis Draft

Lent Term

Week 1 (25 January)

Staffan Müller-Wille: Race and history

• Doron, Claude-Olivier, 'Race and Genealogy. Buffon and the Formation of the Concept of "Race"', HUMANA.MENTE Journal of Philosophical Studies 5 (2012), 75–109
• 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 2 (1 February)

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 (8 February)

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 4 (15 February)

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 5 (22 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

Week 6 (1 March)

Charu Singh: Scientific periodicals in global perspective

• 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
• Dawson, Gowan, and Jonathan R. Topham, 'Introduction: Constructing Scientific Communities', in Gowan Dawson, Bernard V. Lightman, Sally Shuttleworth, and Jonathan R. Topham (eds.), Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), pp. 1–32
• Elshakry, Marwa, Reading Darwin in Arabic, 1860–1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), ch. 1 ('The Gospel of Science', pp. 25–72)

Week 7 (8 March)

Anna Alexandrova: How to think about the dissertation – philosophy

Week 8 (15 March)

Staffan Müller-Wille and Richard Staley: How to think about the dissertation – history