Thomas Hobbes was an English philosopher. Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.
Reproducibility, closely related to replicability and repeatability, is a major principle underpinning the scientific method. For the findings of a study to be reproducible means that results obtained by an experiment or an observational study or in a statistical analysis of a data set should be achieved again with a high degree of reliability when the study is replicated. There are different kinds of replication but typically replication studies involve different researchers using the same methodology. Only after one or several such successful replications should a result be recognized as scientific knowledge.
Simon Walter Blackburn is an English academic philosopher known for his work in metaethics, where he defends quasi-realism, and in the philosophy of language. More recently, he has gained a large general audience from his efforts to popularise philosophy. He has appeared in multiple episodes of the documentary series Closer to Truth. During his long career, he has taught at Oxford University, Cambridge University, and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Sir Simon Michael Schama is an English historian and television presenter. He specialises in art history, Dutch history, Jewish history, and French history. He is a Professor of History and Art History at Columbia University.
St Edmund's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge in England. Founded in 1896, it is the second-oldest of the three Cambridge colleges oriented to mature students, which accept only students reading for postgraduate degrees or for undergraduate degrees if aged 21 years or older.
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. He has received various physics awards including the Wolf Prize in Physics in 2024 for for fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology.
The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) is the study of science as a social activity, especially dealing with "the social conditions and effects of science, and with the social structures and processes of scientific activity." The sociology of scientific ignorance (SSI) is complementary to the sociology of scientific knowledge. For comparison, the sociology of knowledge studies the impact of human knowledge and the prevailing ideas on societies and relations between knowledge and the social context within which it arises.
Lisa Anne Jardine was a British historian of the early modern period.
Steven Shapin is an American historian and sociologist of science. He is the Franklin L. Ford Research Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. He is considered one of the earliest scholars on the sociology of scientific knowledge, and is credited with creating new approaches. He has won many awards, including the 2014 George Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society for career contributions to the field.
Boundary-work is part of science studies. In boundary-work, boundaries, demarcations, or other divisions between fields of knowledge are created, advocated, attacked, or reinforced. Such delineations often have high stakes for the participants, and carry the implication that such boundaries are flexible and socially constructed.
David Walter Runciman, 4th Viscount Runciman of Doxford,, is an English academic and podcaster who until 2024 taught politics and history at the University of Cambridge, where he was Professor of Politics. From October 2014 to October 2018 he was also head of the Department of Politics and International Studies. In April 2024 he decided to resign his position at the university to focus on his podcast full-time. He was subsequently made Honorary Professor of Politics.
Michael Cyril William Hunter is emeritus professor of history in the department of history, classics and archaeology and a fellow of Birkbeck, University of London. Hunter is interested in the culture of early modern England. He specialises in the history of science in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England, particularly the work of Robert Boyle. In Noel Malcolm's judgement, Hunter "has done more for Boyle studies than anyone before him ".
Robert Sharrock (1630–1684) was an English churchman and botanist. He is now known for The History of the Propagation and Improvement of Vegetables by the Concurrence of Art and Nature (1660), for philosophical work directed against Thomas Hobbes, and as an associate of Robert Boyle
Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life is a book by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. It examines the debate between Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes over Boyle's air-pump experiments in the 1660s. In 2005, Shapin and Schaffer were awarded the Erasmus Prize for this work.
The Hobbes–Wallis controversy was a polemic debate that continued from the mid-1650s well into the 1670s, between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and the mathematician and clergyman John Wallis. It was sparked by De corpore, a philosophical work by Hobbes in the general area of physics. The book contained not only a theory of mathematics subordinating it to geometry and geometry to kinematics, but a claimed proof of the squaring of the circle by Hobbes. While Hobbes retracted this particular proof, he returned to the topic with other attempted proofs. A pamphleteering exchange continued for decades. It drew in the newly formed Royal Society, and its experimental philosophy to which Hobbes was opposed.
Walter Warner (1563–1643) was an English mathematician and scientist.
William Anthony Harris FRS FMedSci is a Canadian-born neuroscientist, Professor of Anatomy at Cambridge University, and fellow of Clare College, Cambridge. He was head of the Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience since its formation in 2006 until his retirement in 2018.
Carolin Susan Crawford is a British communicator of science and astrophysicist. She is an emeritus member of the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge and an emeritus fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Simon Stoddart, FSA is a British archaeologist, prehistorian, and academic. He is a Reader in Prehistory at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the acting Deputy Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Melissa Hines is a neuroscientist and Professor at the University of Cambridge. She studies the development of gender, with particular focus on how the interaction of prenatal and postnatal experience shape brain development and behavior.
