Professor Nancy Cartwright

Professor Nancy Cartwright, Centenary Visiting Professor in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford 2025-26 delivered the 2025 PPE Centenary Professorship Lecture at The Queen’s College, Oxford on 12 November, 2025.

Nick Perry (1974, Philosophy) has provided an event report.

Readers may know that Univ and Queens jointly sponsor the Centenary Visiting Fellowship in PPE, and our second Fellow, Nancy Cartwright – Professor of Philosophy at Durham University and distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego – gave the annual lecture in November. The event was hosted by the Master and Prof Ursula Coope, Chair of the Philosophy Faculty Board.

Of philosophers currently working, Prof Cartwright is a truly eminent philosopher of science (her work being the third most cited of any in the literature) and her topic – “Is Economics the Queen of the Social Sciences?” – was intended to bridge at least two of the three PPE disciplines. In fact, to a small degree it even embraced the third, in its references to generic policy implications of her thesis on the epistemic standing and hermeneutic value of economic theories. Spoiler alert: notwithstanding her ready acknowledgement of potentially significant and useful insights deriving from properly contextualised and caveated economic theories, her answer was “no”! Economics and econometrics sometimes pretend to the intellectual respectability of physics, but fail when misapplied beyond their heavily-circumscribed legitimate scope. Though as she and several members of the audience ruefully noted in an extended and illuminating Q&A, economists are certainly the best paid…

The event was followed by further opportunities for rewarding discussion at a reception in Queens, and dinner hosted by the Master in Univ Hall, which all made for a long evening of pleasurable enlightenment. Those of us who support the programme can be well pleased with how the Visiting Fellowship is working out.

The slides from Professor Carwright’s lecture are available here.

For those that could not attend the lecture in person, the audio recording is available here.

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