The HPS Podcast - Conversations from History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Professor Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Professor of Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick. Fuller founded social epistemology as a research programme in the late 1980s, launching the journal Social Epistemology in 1987 and setting out the programme in his book of the same name. He has since written on topics ranging from Thomas Kuhn to science and religion, STS, transhumanism and post-truth. This conversation centres on the university, the subje...

This week, Dr Sophie Ritson is in conversation with Professor Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor in History of Science and Physics at Harvard University, a founding member of the Black Hole Initiative, and coordinator of the History, Philosophy and Culture (HPC) Working Group of the next-generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT). Galison is a historian and philosopher of science whose work has explored how experiments end, how scientific images are made and interpreted, an...

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Jahnavi Phalkey, historian of science and technology, filmmaker, and Founding Director of Science Gallery Bengaluru. Phalkey is the author of Atomic State: Big Science in Twentieth Century India, and producer-director of the documentary film Cyclotron (2020) – a film about the world's oldest functional particle accelerator and the people who keep it running today. Her writing spans the history of science, technology, and the state in twentieth-century ...

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr Mazviita Chirimuuta, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh and author of The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience (MIT Press, 2024) – winner of the 2025 Lakatos Award and the 2024 Nayef Al-Rodhan International Prize in Transdisciplinary Philosophy from the Royal Institute of Philosophy. The conversation centres on the central argument of the book: that the leading ideas which have s...

This week, Thomas Spiteri speaks with Dr. Magdalena Skipper, Editor-in-Chief of Nature. Skipper has held the role since 2018, and has a background in the genetic sciences. She is also notably the first female — and only the eighth person — to lead the journal since its founding in 1869. Skipper reflects on what she has worked to preserve and change since taking on the role, from deepening the connection between Nature's research and journalism teams to broadening the journal's scope beyond th...