Part III and MPhil timetable | Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Part III Manager: Ahmad Elabbar

MPhil Managers: Rosanna Dent, Stephen John

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.

Please note that the schedule below has not yet been updated for the 2026–27 academic year.

Michaelmas Term

Week 1 (15 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 (22 October)

Nick Hopwood: Serial knowledge

Hopwood, Nick, Dramas of Development: Imaging the Human Embryo Series (book manuscript), chapters 1 and 3
Hopwood, Nick, Simon Schaffer and Jim Secord, 'Seriality and Scientific Objects in the Nineteenth Century', History of Science 48 (2010), 251–285

Week 3 (29 October)

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 4 (5 November)

Marta Halina: Animal minds

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

Week 5 (12 November)

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

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

Week 6 (19 November)

Ahmad Elabbar: Global environmental assessments

Oppenheimer, Michael, Naomi Oreskes, Dale Jamieson, Keynyn Brysse, Jessica O'Reilly, Matthew Shindell and Milena Wazeck, Discerning Experts: The Practices of Scientific Assessment for Environmental Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), chapters 1 & 6, pp. 1–18, 195–210
Hughes, Hannah, and Alice B.M. Vadrot, 'Weighting the World: IPBES and the Struggle over Biocultural Diversity', Global Environmental Politics 19:2 (2019), 14–37
Elabbar, Ahmad, 'Values and Assessment Reports on Climate Change', in Kevin C. Elliott and Ted Richards (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Values and Science (forthcoming)

Week 7 (26 November)

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 8 (3 December)

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

Lent Term

Week 1 (28 January)

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 2 (4 February)

Tom McClelland: Perceiving affordances for action

Chong, Isis, and Robert W. Proctor, 'On the Evolution of a Radical Concept: Affordances According to Gibson and Their Subsequent Use and Development', Perspectives on Psychological Science 15 (2020), 117–132
McClelland, Tom, and Paulina Sliwa, 'Gendered Affordance Perception and Unequal Domestic Labour', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107 (2023), 501–524
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 (11 February)

Emma Perkins: Print and patronage

Biagioli, Mario, 'Galileo the Emblem Maker', Isis 81 (1990), 230–258
Perkins, Emma, 'Instruments of Authority: Tycho Brahe's Technological Illustrations', History and Technology 34 (2018), 259–272

Week 4 (18 February)

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 (2021), 497–527
Espinosa, Mariola, 'Globalizing the History of Disease, Medicine, and Public Health in Latin America', Isis 104 (2013), 798–806
Anderson, Warwick, 'Making Global Health History: The Postcolonial Worldliness of Biomedicine', Social History of Medicine 27 (2014), 372–384

Week 5 (25 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 (4 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