HPS at Melbourne in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia | College & University

HPS at Melbourne

Locality: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Phone: +61 3 8344 5142

Address: Arts West Building, The University of Melbourne 3010 Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Website: http://hps.unimelb.edu.au

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25.01.2022 Wed 2 May, 12pm, MacMahon Ball Theatre (Rm 107) OLD ARTS Prof Jack Reynolds (Philosophy, Deakin University) Temporal naturalism: Reconciling the 4Ms and points of view within naturalism

24.01.2022 LAST HPS SEMINAR OF 2018. Not to be missed!!! Wednesday 28 Nov, Rm256--North Wing, ARTS WEST 5pm, followed by dinner (tbd)... Professor Rob Wilson (Philosophy, La Trobe University) Social engagement in contemporary history and philosophy of science This is our first official 'HPS engagement' seminar. We plan to run one each semester from now on. Rob will discuss some examples from his own work, such as the The Eugenic Mind Project (MIT Press, 2018). And the new Philosophical Engagement in Public Life (PEiPL) network he has started this year, which has a philosophy of science working group. Rob is a professor of philosophy at La Trobe University. His recent work includes "well-being, disability, and choosing children" which recently appeared in the journal Mind. The links below should take you to the Mind site, the first to the abstract (shareable), the second to the paper itself (just for individual download): https://academic.oup.com///doi/10.1093/mind/fzy039/5098725 https://academic.oup.com//advance-article/doi/10.1093/mind

22.01.2022 Wed 15 August, Fritz Lowe Theatre (Room 201)-McCoy building (Earth Sciences) Kevin Orrman-Rossiter, HPS Uni Melb A biography of the positron and its antimatter siblings. 12pm for a quick lunch; 12:15-1:15pm seminar... My PhD will be a biography of the positron from its first conception in the 1920s to roughly the present day. It looks also at the positrons close antimatter family anti-protons, anti-neutrons, ant-neutrinos and antimatter atoms. This is a work in historical epistemology an historical, philosophical and sociological narrative. My research is based on three closely related questions: How does the discovery of the positron, and antimatter as a concept, fit with current models of discovery? What does the positron narrative illuminate about transitions between science and technology regimes, or scenes of inquiry? And How does a modern physics concept, antimatter, change over a period? In this seminar I will look at the discovery of the positron in the 1930s and expand on the historical, philosophical and sociological narratives of my proposed project. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/

22.01.2022 This week's seminar is officially A Big Deal. Prof Geoff Loftus, University of Washington Wed 18 April, 12pm... Measuring the passage of time, the heights of trees, and the rate of forgetting MacMahon Ball Theatre (Rm 107) Old Arts Central to science is figuring out how to measure things e.g., for Physicists, energy; for Astronomers, planetary density; for Chemists, Avogadros constant, and so on. Whereas Psychologists have been remarkably successful in measuring some things, we have been less successful in measuring other things. In particular, in many fields of Psychology, ones goal is to measure some internal entity (e.g., memory strength) which, while presumed to exist, and while central in psychological theories, is not directly observable. One must therefore carry out such measurements using a dependent variable (e.g., probability correct) that is related to the internal entity only in an ill-specified manner. This in turn renders tests of theoretical hypotheses untrustworthy and unstable. I illustrate this problem using fictional measurements of time and height practiced by a fictional group of ancient people, and then demonstrate one solution to it within Psychology, using as an example, how to measure the rate at which people forget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Loftus

21.01.2022 Wed 7 March, 12pm, 5th floor Research Lounge: Arts West-North Wing Dr Maurita Harney, honorary Senior Fellow SHAPS Reconfiguring relations between philosophy and science: the biosemiotic connection... Biosemiotics has been defined as an interdisciplinary research agenda investigating the myriad forms of communication and signification found in and between living systems. In this paper, I explore how biosemiotics provides a point of intersection between philosophy and non-reductionist approaches in the biological sciences. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/#reconfiguring

20.01.2022 The HiPSster club visiting the Map Collection. Everybody welcome!

20.01.2022 It's a double seminar week! First, on Wednesday, "Impromptu Journal of My Heart": Carson McCullers's Therapeutic Recordings, April - May 1958 by Professor Carlos Dews. Then, on Friday, "Stereotype threat effects: A failure to replicate" by Professor Franca Agnoli See below for details of both....Continue reading

20.01.2022 Wednesday 10 Oct, William MacMahon Ball Theatre OLD ARTS Botanical Explorations: Women, Knowledge, and Plants in 19th-Century Canada 12pm for lunch; 12:15pm for the seminar... Professor Ann Shteir (York University) My title, Botanical Explorations, refers to a project about women who cultivated knowledge of plants in 19th-century Canada and also to methodological and historiographical questions that arise from this research. Histories of botanical work in that colonial place and time are patchy, shaped largely by the disciplinary formation of botanical science and institutional accounts of universities and professional societies. To widen the story, a workshop funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada brought academics from history, art history, landscape studies, literary studies, biology, and the history of Canadian science, together with archivists and botanists working in government and botanical gardens. What, we asked, are new resources for finding and studying women of that time who collected plants, contributed to floristic projects, wrote about plants, and included botany in school curricula? What new perspectives can feminist studies, colonial studies, archival concerns, and interests in networks, practices, and topics in the cultural history of science yield in situating individual stories within broader frameworks? In addition to providing a brief overview of the project, this seminar will sketch findings about gender, class, access to knowledge, and identity that emerge from research into Mary Brenton who collected plants in 1830s Newfoundland for William Jackson Hookers imperial Flora Boreali-Americana (1829-40).

20.01.2022 We've got some new activities coming up. Everybody's welcome to the HiPSSters Club!

19.01.2022 This week's seminar is a series of short talks by the Interdisciplinary Meta-Research Group. Wednesday 19 Sept 12pm, North Lecture Theatre, OLD ARTS.

18.01.2022 Wed 23 May, MacMahon Ball Theatre (Rm 107) OLD ARTS The sorrows of Robert Lee: Self, identity and science in early Victorian medicine Dr James Bradley, HPS, University of Melbourne... Robert Lee, obstetrician and gynaecologist, is not a highly regarded figure in the history of medicine usually confined to short discussions about mid-nineteenth century pain management in labour and his antipathy to the speculum. This seminar will do nothing to persuade you that his reputation should be recovered. Rather, I will explore the intersection of biography, reading and scientific medicine through an analysis of Lees journal, a common-place book he kept from the mid-1830s through to his death in the 1877. The journal reveals that Lee was an avid reader of biography and other forms of life writing (obituaries &c.), and his reading of these tended to elide with his own life situation, revealing considerable fractures in the emergent ideal of the Good Doctor. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/

17.01.2022 Wednesday 24 Oct 2018, William Macmahon Ball Theatre OLD ARTS The value and power of person-centred care for people with dementia. A philosophical discussion Rev Dr Stephen Ames (HPS, UniMelb)... This paper briefly reviews the introduction of person-centred care (p-cc) for example by Tom Kitwood in UK in the late 1980s, (Dementia Reconsidered, The Person Comes First, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1997), which in some places has replaced a widely used bio-medical model of dementia and the care of people with dementia. While p-cc had diversified in many ways since then the change may be represented as follows : from the person with DEMENTIA the PERSON with dementia. Whereas the bio-medical approach was described as warehousing, the change to p-cc led to many benefits for people with dementia, albeit within a continuing trajectory of overall decline. The paper affirms the practice of p-cc but questions Kitwoods understanding of personhood as an attributed status, with the consequence of relativising the assumed absolute value of persons, which he argued did not need any theological justification as it was the only assumption on which our life as social beings makes sense. The assumption does not hold, for example, when the social life of a person with dementia often unravels as the dementia develops or when euthanasia is offered as a treatment option for someone whose life is judged to be over. (Examples from other contexts are easily identified.) An alternative is discussed which takes the practice of p-cc as embodying the recognition of the unconditional worth of persons as a fact about the person. The paper argues that this alternative is intelligible, John Mackies critique of queer facts, not withstanding, (Ethics, Inventing Right and Wrong, London, Penguin 1990), and that there is some evidence in support of the alternative arising from Stephen Darwalls, The Second Person Standpoint, Morality, Respect and Accountability, (Cambridge Mass., Harvard University Press, 2006).

15.01.2022 Dr Gina Perry will give a seminar based on her new book this Wed at 12pm, 5th floor research lounge Arts West. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/#muzafer

14.01.2022 This Thurs evening (26/04 6pm) in Brunswick: Dr Gina Perry's book launch The Lost Boys https://scribepublications.com.au//book-launch-the-lost-bo

13.01.2022 The HiPSsters Club with John Wilkins

12.01.2022 Wednesday 12 September Avoiding real mischief: Towards a phenomenology of self-patterns in diagnosis and therapy Dr Anya Daly, HPS Uni Melb... Room 239 (North Lecture Theatre), OLD ARTS 12pm for lunch, 12:15pm for seminar The application of the theory and standards of the natural sciences to the domain of the human sciences is a particularly fraught enterprise when it comes to psychology and psychiatry. Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavours to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. We argue that an alternative, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to these vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/

12.01.2022 Wed 28 Feb 2018 Re-sizing psychology in public policy and the private imagination Dr Mark Furlong , Thinker-in-Residence at La Trobes Bouverie Family Centre The seminar will focus on material from Re-sizing Psychology in Public Policy and the Private Imagination (Palgrave, UK. 2016). ... Initially, a critique of psychologys prestige is developed. This critique centres on psychologys essential instability where: in the first instance, the discipline presents itself as an objective science which possesses both precision and utility, & in the second instance, the discipline is identified with the antithesis of the instrumental that which is profound and mysterious. The seminar will contest Psychologys claim to being a science, its claims to effectiveness in, and beyond, the consulting room, and its relationship with psychotherapy. More broadly, Psychologys role in dubious sub-fields, such as the design of addictive gaming machines, will also be reviewed. Beyond specific criticisms, a single theme is argued: mainstream Psychology performs a conservative, albeit disavowed, role in decisions about normality and pathology. This regulative function, it will be argued, acts to discipline identity and subjectivity and to construct the self as amoral and disconnected Presented by an informed outsider, the session will be provocative to those who have a stake in the role of, and the claims made by, the psychology industry. About the speaker: Mark Furlong PhD. is an independent scholar and Thinker-in-Residence at La Trobes Bouverie Family Centre. Mark practiced for 20 years in therapeutic and mental health roles before taking up academic appointments. Mark writes a regular column for Arena magazine and has published around 60 refereed papers and book chapters. His book Building the clients relational base; A multidisciplinary Handbook was published by Policy Press, UK, in 2014.

12.01.2022 You can hear Emily Herring, one of our HPS Seminar speakers from Semester 1, speak about Henri Bergson's influence on ideas about evolution on ABC's The Philosophers' Zone. https://www.abc.net.au//philos/rockstar-and-rocks/11342570

11.01.2022 WEDNESDAY 16 MAY, 12pm MacMahon Ball Theatre, OLD ARTS Dr Kristian Camilleri, HPS, University of Melbourne... Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony: Revisiting the Cushing Thesis The last few decades has witnessed something of a shift in attitudes towards the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Since the 1990s, there has been a resurgence of interest in new approaches, which have challenged the orthodox view. This has prompted a number of physicists and philosophers, particularly those sympathetic to alternatives such as Bohms hidden variables theory, to suggest that if only historical circumstances had been only slightly different then it would have been very likely that Bohms deterministic interpretation would have been proposed and accepted first, and would be dominating today. James Cushing first articulated this thesis in his Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and Copenhagen Hegemony in 1994. But to my knowledge such claims have never been subjected to careful historical scrutiny. Historians tend to be naturally suspicious of counterfactual historical claims. Nevertheless, Cushings thesis does raise an interesting question about why the orthodoxy went virtually unchallenged for so long, in spite of persistent and nagging criticisms from such eminent physicists as Einstein and Schrödinger. This paper forms part of a larger project, which attempts to answer this question. Here I attempt to throw new light on this culture of orthodoxy, which first emerged in the late 1920s, by bringing together different perspectives from the philosophy and sociology of science and the cultural history of physics.

10.01.2022 Philosophical Perspectives on Biosciences starts tomorrow night in the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne! There are still some places left if you want to register today, but it is booking out fast so hurry up! Prof Kim Sterelny, Tues 13th March 7-8:30pm Moral Minds: Norms and their Evolution https://events.unimelb.edu.au//10105-philosophical-perspec... Prof Paul Griffiths, Wed 14th March 7-8:30pm What is Biological Essentialism? https://events.unimelb.edu.au//10107-philosophical-perspec

10.01.2022 Wed 30 May, 12pm MacMahon Ball Theatre (Rm 107) OLD ARTS Media portrayals of baby brain Natasha Abrahams, Monash University... Baby brain, as it is popularly known, is the condition of chronic forgetfulness which befalls pregnant women and mothers of infants. The existence of baby brain is contested, as are the mechanisms behind the phenomenon. The concept of baby brain explicitly connects womens reproductive function with their cognitive capacity. This research explores how baby brain is reported upon in Australian mainstream news reporting. Drawing on a sample of 103 articles spanning almost two decades, each reporting on research pertaining to the effects of motherhood on the brain, I contend that hormonal mechanisms are privileged in conceptualising baby brain, at the expense of considering other explanations such as sleep deprivation. The emphasis on hormonal action reinforces that baby brain is inevitable for new mothers, and therefore obscures the impact of social factors in producing the condition. I also examine articles reporting on scientific studies which claim to disprove the existence of baby brain and argue that journalists systematically challenge study findings by inserting anecdotes about new mothers experiences of absent-mindedness. Overall, the effect is a media bias towards promoting the existence and stability of baby brain.

10.01.2022 Wednesday 17 Oct, North Lecture Theatre, OLD ARTS The Mobile Museum: Kew, Melbourne, and the circulation of biocultural collections in the late 19th century 12pm for lunch; 12:15pm for the seminar... Dr Caroline Cornish (University of London) The Museum of Economic Botany opened at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in 1847. Throughout its existence as a public space for the display of useful plants and their products (1847-1987), the collections grew such that eventually four separate buildings were required to house them. However, during that period the Museum not only collected, but also redistributed thousands of objects to other institutions on a global scale. The Mobile Museum: Economic Botany in Circulation is a 3-year collaborative research project between Kew Gardens and Royal Holloway, University of London, which is mapping the circulation of these objects across international networks of exchange in the 19th and 20th centuries, in an attempt to better understand the motivations and outcomes of this activity, and specifically to define what is gained and what is lost when museum objects move. In this talk, we present some of their key findings to date and focus in on Kew's relations with Melbourne institutions in the late 19th century, pinpointing the key actors involved and the objects exchanged. What is revealed is a rich history of colonial, scientific and personal endeavour over a formative period in the development of the State of Victoria. Dr Caroline Cornish is a research fellow in the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London and an honorary research associate at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of museum, science and empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Dr Mark Nesbitt is research leader for economic botany and curator of the Economic Botany Collection (EBC) at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and a visiting professor in the Department of Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London.

09.01.2022 HPS seminars are back for semester 2! Endangered Maize: Indigenous Corn, Industrial Agriculture, and the Specter of Extinction Dr Helen Curry, Cambridge University OLD ARTS Room 229... Wednesday 1 August, 12pm quick lunch; 12:15-1:15pm seminar Many people in different contexts, from plant geneticists to indigenous farmers to industrial agriculturists, agree today that the corn they tend is endangered. In this talk, I explore how a crop as dominant in global production as corn (Zea mays, also known as maize) has come to be the object of diverse conservation activities. I chart the early emergence of concerns about corn's vulnerability and responses to these concerns through two examples: the collection and sale of "Indian corn" in the US northwest by the Oscar H. Will seed company in the early 1900s and the ambitious pan-American seed banking initiative of the Committee on Preservation of Indigenous Strains of Maize in the 1950s. In both cases, the growth of industrial agriculture fostered new appreciation of the diversity of earlier corn varieties as resources for expanding production. Yet those earlier corn varieties were by and large in the possession of indigenous farmers whose communities and ways of life were thought to be fast disappearing. As I show, those who sought to conserve potentially valuable corn varieties were aware of and reliant on the knowledge of indigenous peoples and also attempted to render this knowledge inessential to their work. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/

08.01.2022 Don't forget our extra talk this week... Friday 23 Nov, Room 556North Wing, ARTS WEST 1-2pm, followed by a HPS PARTY in the 5th floor Research Lounge to celebrate recent PhD completitions.... Stereotype threat effects: A failure to replicate Professor Franca Agnoli, Psychology, University of Padova, Italy Many studies conducted over decades have found that males, on average, perform better than females in mathematics, although the size of this gender gap is small and has been decreasing. Some authors have argued that stereotype threat is a principal cause of the gender gap in mathematics. They claim that gender differences arise because the performance of females is affected by their fear of confirming a negative stereotype about their mathematical ability. Recent research has, however, challenged this explanation for the gender gap. Striking inconsistencies in reported stereotype threat effects may be due to flawed experimental designs and inappropriate statistical analyses. We studied stereotype threat effects in mathematics among Italian high school students. Using Logistic Mixed-Effects Models treating both subjects and mathematics problems as random effects, we found that males performed better than females, but we found no evidence of a stereotype threat effect. We conclude that stereotype threat effects as an explanation for gender differences in mathematics are not robust.

05.01.2022 Public lecture series on 13 and 14 March, two talks by Professors Kim Sterelny and Paul Griffiths at the University of Melbourne.

05.01.2022 8-August-2018 Can Science and Religion be reconciled? Dr John Wilkins, HPS University of Melbourne OLD ARTS Room 239-North Lecture Theatre... 12pm for lunch; seminar starts at 12:15pm The Conflict Thesis between science and religion is justly regarded as a gross, if not entirely false, oversimplification, but there does seem to be tension between religious and scientific claims in practice, particularly in the ontological and epistemic claims made by those on both sides. In this talk I shall consider whether there actually are ontologies and epistemes unique to either class, firmly concluding that there may not be. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/

02.01.2022 Wed 6 June, 12pm Rm 553 ARTS WEST-North wing Jack the Ripper: The Divided Self and the Alien Other in Late-Victorian Culture and Society Michael Plater, HPS University of Melbourne (PhD completion seminar)... This thesis examines late-Victorian representations of the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. Focusing on the two most prevalent theories Jack as alien foreigner, Jack as divided British gentleman it contends that these representations were indicative of emergent cultural anxieties relating to the self and other. Evaluating the wider psychological and sociological impact of the case, it argues that the crimes exposed the deep sense of fracture and duality that underpinned late-Victorian life, challenging dominant notions of identity and selfhood.

02.01.2022 The HiPSster club: Meet your local academic! Everybody welcome!

02.01.2022 TUESDAY 28 August, 12pm (for lunch, seminar at 12:15pm) Rm 239 North Lecture Theatre, OLD ARTS Valuation and evaluation practices in the social sciences and humanities... Prof Sarah de Rijcke Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, Leiden University, The Netherlands New forms of evaluation are reconfiguring science and social life in ways we are only beginning to understand. The growing use of evaluations and their constitutive effects (Dahler-Larsen, 2014) are subject of considerable debate. While some analysts welcome the possibility of increasing transparency through performance data, recent years have also seen high-profile initiatives drawing attention to perceived damaging effects of an increasing metric-orientation in research assessment (e.g. the Leiden Manifesto, DORA). In this talk I will share results from recent projects in the social sciences and humanities in which we analyzed interactions between evaluation and knowledge production on the shop-floor of academic research. Does what is evaluated also coincide with what is valued highly? The work contributes to a better understanding and conceptualization of the intricate ways in which evaluation, valuation and knowledge production interact. https://hpsseminar.wordpress.com/

01.01.2022 A miniconference on the replication crisis in science, with a keynote introduction by the founder of the Society for Improving Psychological Science, Professor Simine Varize. 14-15 Nov, Arts West, Uni Melb. Organised by the Interdisciplinary MetaResearch Group (IMeRG). Free but please register.