Speakers are invited to present a paper with a strict upper time limit of 45 minutes, after which there is discussion for an hour.

Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and several papers regarded as founding documents of various schools of thoughts had their first airing at a club meeting.

[2] 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.

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 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.

[5] 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.

[7]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.

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.

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.

[9] 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":[10] Second meeting Oct 26th, 1946 In the first part of his paper Dr Popper explained how he chose this topic as a consequence of his astonishment and surprise at the Secretary's letter of invitation*, which made use of such expressions as "a short paper," "open a discussion," "state a philosophical puzzle" etc, which reflected a different view from his own as to what philosophy is.

In discussion, however, it turned out that to give an example of the "beyond the preliminaries" problem is a difficult task which calls for both labour and time.