 The club has met at Newnham College since 2014. | |
| Founded | First recorded meeting 19 October 1878 at Trinity |
|---|---|
| Focus | Philosophy |
| Location | |
| Website | The Moral Sciences Club |
The Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club, founded in October 1878, is a philosophy discussion group that meets weekly at the University of Cambridge during term time. Speakers are invited to present a paper with a strict upper time limit of 45 minutes, after which there is discussion for an hour. Several Colleges have hosted the Club: Trinity College, King's College, Clare College, Darwin College, St John's College, and from 2014 Newnham College.
The club has been highly influential in analytic philosophy because of the concentration of philosophers at Cambridge. Members have included many of British philosophy's top names, such as Henry Sidgwick, J.M.E. McTaggart, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and several papers regarded as founding documents of various schools of thoughts had their first airing at a club meeting. Moore's "The Nature of Judgment" was first read to the club on 21 October 1898.[1] "Knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description" was presented to a meeting in 1911, and in 1926 what became Frank Ramsey’s Truth and Probability. Russell's "Limits of Empiricism" was read in the Michaelmas term of 1935, Friedrich Hayek's "The Facts of the Social Sciences" was read in the Michaelmas term of 1942, and Moore's paradox was first read in Michaelmas 1944. Almost every major anglophone philosopher since the Second World War has delivered a paper to the club.[2]
It was during a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club in October 1946 that Wittgenstein famously waved a poker at Sir Karl Popper during a heated discussion about whether philosophical problems are real or just linguistic games.[2]
- ^ Moore, G.E. "The Nature of Judgment" Archived 2007-08-13 at the Wayback Machine, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, April 1899.
- ^ a b Ahmed, Arif. "The Moral Sciences Club (A Short History)", Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, 2013, accessed 30 September 2013.