The Cambridge University Moral Sciences Club,
founded in October 1878, is a philosophy discussion
group that meets weekly at 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.
Frank P. Ramsey's "Knowledge by acquaintance
and knowledge by description" was presented
to a meeting in 1911, and in 1926 became 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.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.
== History ==
=== 
Origins ===
The club originally emerged from the Grote
Society in 1874, but it lasted only two years.
In 1878, another group decided to revive it,
led by Alfred Caldecott —later professor
of logic and mental philosophy at King's College
London—when he was a third-year undergraduate
at John's.
They used the same name, and regular meetings
began on 19 October 1878, consisting of Caldecott;
Joseph Jacobs, later founder of the Jewish
Historical Society and a friend of George
Eliot; and Alfred Momerie, who also became
a professor of logic at King's College London.
It was decided that meetings would take place
each Saturday in term time at nine in the
evening, with membership restricted to those
who had taken or were reading for the moral
sciences tripos.
The first recorded club paper was "Development
Theories of Conscience," read by T.E.
Scrutton of Trinity College on 26 October
that year.
=== Cambridge Apostles ===
Jack Pitt infers from the decision to meet
on Saturdays that none of the original members
were Apostles, the secret Cambridge debating
society that had been meeting on Saturdays
since it was formed in 1820.
The day of the club meeting was changed to
Friday in 1885, when Henry Sidgwick was president,
which allowed the Apostles to attend club
meetings, and vice versa.
Sidgwick was already an Apostle and J.M.E.
McTaggart became both club secretary and an
Apostle in 1886.
Several other Apostles joined the club over
the years—including Bertrand Russell, John
Maynard Keynes, A.N.
Whitehead, G. Lowes Dickinson, G.H.
Hardy, Crompton Llewelyn Davies, C.P. Sanger,
A.E.A.W.
Smyth, and H.T. Norton—and several Apostles
after Sidgwick and McTaggart became officers
of the club, including G.E. Moore and Ludwig
Wittgenstein.
== Women ==
Women were never formally restricted from
membership, but because women were not allowed
to take the tripos examinations until 1881
and were not granted full membership of the
university with the right to obtain degrees
until 1947, the club was mostly a male affair
in its early days.
The first record of women even listening to
papers was in Michaelmas 1894, when Sidney
Webb read "The Economic Basis of Trade Unionism,"
and the audience included his wife Beatrice
Webb and two women from Girton College, a
women's college.
The first woman to read a paper was Emily
Elizabeth Constance Jones, who spoke about
James Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism on
1 December 1899 in McTaggart's rooms.
Sidgwick was in the chair, which Jack Pitt
writes was significant, because he had been
at the forefront of the campaign to admit
women to the university, and his wife, Eleanor
Mildred Balfour, had become president of Newnham
College, another women's college, in 1892.In
1906, the club minutes make clear that women
were still not fully accepted: "after the
lady visitors departed the following were
elected members of the Club," and no women
were among those listed.
There were five women members from Newnham
in 1908 and in 1912 six from Newnham and five
from Girton.
Miss Dorothy Wrinch read a paper on 7 December
1917 about "Mr Russell's Theory of Judgment,"
which Pitt writes was probably the same paper
she had published in Mind in 1919 as On the
Nature of Judgment.
By 1926, there were woman officers, including
Elsie Whetnall, the club secretary, and later
G.E.M.
(Elizabeth) Anscombe, who continued to speak
to the club until at least the 1980s.
== Wittgenstein ==
Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911
and became a member of the club in 1912, when
he suggested that no paper last more than
seven minutes, a rule adopted on 15 November
1912, though soon abandoned.
He gave his first paper on 29 November that
year, called "What is philosophy?", at a meeting
in his rooms at Trinity.
Fifteen members were present, including G.E.
Moore.
The minutes record:
Mr Wittgenstein ... read a paper entitled
"What is Philosophy?"
The paper lasted only about 4 minutes, thus
cutting the previous record established by
Mr Tye by nearly two minutes.
Philosophy was defined as all those primitive
propositions which are assumed as true without
proof by the various sciences.
This defn. was much discussed but there was
no general disposition to adopt it.
The discussion was kept very well to the point,
and the Chairman did not find it necessary
to intervene much.
He left Cambridge in 1913, but returned in
January 1929 and started attended meetings
again, but he was an intense man and was accused
of dominating discussion, which led him to
break off his relationship with the club for
a few years in 1931.
Another member, Fania Pascal, wrote that he
was the disturbing centre of the evenings.
"He would talk for long periods without interruption,
using similes and allegories, stalking about
the room and gesticulating.
He cast a spell."His dominance of the Moral
Sciences Club reached its height in October
1946 during a meeting that is now legendary
among philosophers.
It was on 25 October in Richard Braithwaite's
rooms in the Gibbs building at King's (room
three on the first floor of staircase H).
A confrontation arose between Wittgenstein,
who was chairing the meeting, and the evening's
guest speaker, Karl Popper, Reader in Logic
and Scientific Method at the London School
of Economics.
The meeting had been organized by Wasfi Hijab,
the club secretary, and was attended by 30
philosophers—dons and students—including
Peter Geach, Peter Gray-Lucas, Georg Kreisel,
Peter Munz, Stephen Plaister, Bertrand Russell,
Stephen Toulmin, John Vinelott, and Michael
Wolff.
It was reportedly the only time Popper, Russell,
and Wittgenstein—three of the world's most
eminent philosophers—were ever together.Popper
was reading "Are there philosophical problems?"
and an argument broke out about the nature
of philosophy: whether philosophical problems
were real, which was Popper's position, or
just linguistic puzzles, which was Wittgenstein's.
The pair almost came to blows, with Wittgenstein
pointing Braithwaite's reportedly red-hot
poker at Popper, demanding that he give an
example of a moral rule.
Popper offered one: "Not to threaten visiting
speakers with pokers," at which point Wittgenstein
stormed out in a huff.
The minutes make no mention of the poker incident,
recording only that, "The meeting was charged
to an unusual degree with a spirit of controversy":
== Notes ==
== 
Further reading ==
== 
External links ==
[1] on Cambridge University's official website
