The Board of History and Philosophy of Science give notice that the prescribed sources for the essay component of the Natural Sciences Tripos, Part II, in History and Philosophy of Science, 2005-06, are as follows:
| Paper 1 | Selections from S. Parpola (ed.), Letters from Assyrian and Babylonian Scholars (1990). |
| Paper 2 | Fontenelle, tr, Behn, A Discovery of New Worlds (1688). |
| Paper 3 | Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (1859). |
| Paper 4 | Bas van Fraassen, The Scientific Image (1981), chapter 2. |
| Paper 5 | John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 1995. |
| Paper 6 | Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), chapters 2-4. |
| Paper 7 | Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia (1615), Book 4. |
| Paper 8 | 'The Geneticists' Manifesto', Nature, 1939. |
| Paper 9 | A.D. Sokal, 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity', Social Text 46/47 (Spring/Summer 1996), 217-52 and 'Revelation: a physicist experiments with cultural studies', Lingua Franca, May/June 1996, 62-4. |
| Paper 10 | Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962). |
Each source will have four hours of seminars. The seminars for each source will be held in the first half of Michaelmas Term 2005. Candidates are advised to attend seminars for four Primary Sources. These will normally be those sources associated with the three papers they are offering plus one other. Candidates will be required to write essays on two sources, which must be submitted to the Examiners on Monday, 23 January 2006. Each essay should be not more than 3,000 words in length (including footnotes, but excluding bibliography).