Membership of the Philosophical Society is open to graduates of the University of Cambridge, and graduates of other universities who at the time of application are resident in or near Cambridge. Members are also known as Fellows. In order to be elected a Fellow of the Society, a person must be recommended by a proposer, who must have been a Fellow for at least three years, and by a supporter who knows the candidate in a professional capacity. The supporter is to be a person of appropriate standing (e.g. academic staff member in the place of work of the applicant). They do not have to be a member of the society, but must know the applicant personally. Approved candidates are elected at open meetings of the Society following proposal at Council Meetings.
Completed membership application forms should be submitted with electronic signatures by a .pdf attachment to the Society’s email at philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk. The proposer and the supporter must be included as copy recipients in the email when submitting your membership application form to validate their signatures.Please note that your membership of the Society will commence the date you pay your first subscription of £20.
Subscriptions can be paid by a bank transfer to the Society's bank account, (please refer to the Subscription form below for bank details), cheque or standing order. If paying by bank transfer, please send an email to philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk to confirm when you have paid and the reference you have used (ie surname or your CSRid), this will enable us to trace your payment on our bank statement.
Fellows pay an annual subscription of £20, due in advance on 1 January each year. If you are elected in the Michaelmas Term, in any year, you will not be required to pay the subscription which became due on the preceding 1 January. A Fellow, or Fellow-elect, may compound for all annual subscriptions with a single payment of £150. A Fellow of ten years' standing may compound for all future annual subscriptions with a single payment of £100.
A Fellow may choose to receive either Mathematical Proceedings or Biological Reviews, currently £30 for Mathematical Proceedings and £15 per annum for Biological Reviews. If a Fellow is a registered Postgraduate Student, resident in Cambridge on 1 January of any year, there is no additional charge, for that year, for whichever of our journals is deemed relevant by their Supervisor. In these cases, the journal will be delivered to their College or Department for Mathematical Proceedings and by online access for Biological Reviews by request to the Executive Secretary.
A Fellow who has reached the aged of 67 and has been a Fellow for 25 years may request the Council to remit future subscriptions. Any Fellow wishing to take advantage of this bye-law should contact the Executive Secretary.
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From Darwin’s paper on evolution to the development of stem cell research, publications from the Society continue to shape the scientific landscape.
Mathematical Proceedings is one of the few high-quality journals publishing original research papers that cover the whole range of pure and applied mathematics, theoretical physics and statistics.
Biological Reviews covers the entire range of the biological sciences, presenting several review articles per issue. Although scholarly and with extensive bibliographies, the articles are aimed at non-specialist biologists as well as researchers in the field.
The Spirit of Inquiry celebrates the 200th anniversary of the remarkable Cambridge Philosophical Society and brings to life the many remarkable episodes and illustrious figures associated with the Society, including Adam Sedgwick, Mary Somerville, Charles Darwin, and Lawrence Bragg.
Become a Fellow of the Society and enjoy the benefits that membership brings. Membership costs £20 per year.
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Kipling’s “Iron‒Cold Iron‒is master of them all” captures the familiar importance of metals as structural materials. Yet common metals are not necessarily hard; they can become so when deformed. This phenomenon, strain hardening, was first explained by G. I. Taylor in 1934. Ninety years on from this pioneering work on dislocation theory, we explore the deformation of metals when dislocations do not exist, that is when the metals are non-crystalline. These amorphous metals have record-breaking combinations of properties. They behave very differently from the metals that Taylor studied, but we do find phenomena for which his work (in a dramatically different context) is directly relevant.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, U.K. policy-makers claimed to be "following the science". Many commentators objected that the government did not live up to this aim. Others worried that policy-makers ought not blindly "follow" science, because this involves an abdication of responsibility. In this talk, I consider a third, even more fundamental concern: that there is no such thing as "the" science. Drawing on the case of adolescent vaccination against Covid-19, I argue that the best that any scientific advisory group can do is to offer a partial perspective on reality. In turn, this has important implications for how we think about science and politics.
Please Note: Due to building works, the CPS office at 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge is now closed until further notice. Business operations as usual. Please contact us by email only: philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk
Cambridge Philosophical Society17 Mill LaneCambridgeCB2 1RXUnited Kingdom
Office Hours: (Temporarily closed)Monday and Thursday -10am-12pm and 2pm-4pm.
philosoc@group.cam.ac.uk