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Current and previous PhD research

Current PhD Research

Rebecca Davis

  • Thick concepts and reasons for action
  • Supervisors: Mary Leng and Stephen Everson

Chelsea Demanche

  • Supervisor: Tom Stoneham

Jake Dorothy

  • A Phenomenological Analysis of Complex Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
  • Supervisor: Matthew Ratcliffe

Thomas Dowling

  • An historical review and reconstruction of 'reification'
  • My project is in Critical Theory and investigates the possibility of 'Total Reification' through the method of immanent critique. I am looking particularly at the dysfunctionality of 'progressive politics' in the West and the extent to which capitalism is increasingly governing our social activity in the cultural sphere.
  • Supervisors: James Clarke, Owen Hulatt

Denise Goh

  • Post-truth as a Struggle for Recognition: a critical analysis of ideology, identity, and institutions in knowledge preservation

  • Supervisors: James Clarke, Owen Hulatt

Devon Howard

  • Supervisors: Hannah Carnegy-Arbuthnott, Alan Thomas 

Nasir Khan

  • Should physicalism postulate higher-orders of reality?

  • Supervisor: Paul Noordhof

Ivan Kyambadde

  • The Biomimicry of Sentience as a Path to AGI
  • Supervisor: Tom Stoneham

Gabriel Nemirovsky

  • Supervisors: Alan Thomas, Martin O'Neill

Jacob O'Sullivan

  • Supervisor: Mary Leng

Robin Pawlett-Howell

  • Phenomenology, Self-Respect, and Justice: Creating a Dialogue Between French Phenomenology and a Rawlsian Approach to Justice
  • Supervisors: Martin O'Neill, Matthew Ratcliffe

Angelos Sofocleous

  • The phenomenological experience of non-participant spectatorship in depression
  • My research focuses on the phenomenology of mental illnesses, particularly on the notion of non-participant spectatorship in depression. I look at various accounts of first-person depression experiences and explore how depression can be understood through disturbances in the intersubjective realm. This thesis explores how such experiences can be understood in intersubjective terms. I examine intersubjective disturbances that occur in depression experiences, and argue that we can understand such disturbances as losses of reciprocity and interaffectivity, which further give rise to one being 'differently attuned' to the world. As a result, the depressed individual feels alienated, isolated, and cut off from the world. Through exploring depression experiences intersubjectively, this thesis provides an account of what talk of being a spectator or describing the experience of depression in spectatorial terms is getting at.
  • Supervisors: Matthew Ratcliffe, Keith Allen

Isobel Standen

  • Defeasible Reasoning for Resilient Autonomous Systems
  • Supervisors: Alan Thomas, Radu Calinescu, Zoe Porter 

Daryl Tyrer

  • Supervisors: Tom Stoneham, Mary Leng

Kendra Wegscheidler

  • What is a Philosophical Novel? Exploring the Significant Philosophical Contributions Made By Literature
  • My focus is on the philosophy of literature. My research asks the question: what is a philosophical novel? More specifically I want to discover the conditions under which a novel can count as a serious and valuable work of literature and also make a significant contribution to philosophy.
  • Supervisor: Peter Lamarque

Jane Wilson

  • A theory of forgiveness
  • Both forgiveness and justice are required to facilitate positive interpersonal relationships, which are essential to our well-being. The paradox of forgiveness demonstrates that they result in incompatible consequences for wrongdoing; justice demands some sort of adverse consequence which is, at least in part, negated if we forgive.
  • Supervisor: Martin O'Neill

Sarah Wood

  • What it is like to have Dementia: A Phenomenological Study
  • Supervisor: Matthew Ratcliffe

 

Past theses

 

  • Daniel Kim - Naïve Realism and Perceptual Phenomenology (2023)
  • Sam Dickson - An Investigation Into the Nature of Mathematical Objects (2023)
  • Catherine Yarrow - The philosophy of religious language (2023)
  • Ed Willems - Does Metaphysical Deflationism require Global Expressivism? (2023)
  • Nicholas Gardner - Rescuing Freedom - A Free Market Response to G.A.Cohen (MA by research, 2022)
  • Sara Peppe - Is Quine’s account of probability coherent with Quantum Mechanics? (2022)
  • Jacopo Frascaroli - Learning from Art: A Predictive Processing Proposal (2022)
  • Debbie Wells - A Dennettian plus Prediction Error Account of Delusion (2022)
  • Xuanqi Zhu - Aesthetic activity and human evolution: an inter-disciplinary approach (2022)
  • Lillian Wilde - Trauma, Alienation, and Intersubjectivity: a phenomenological account of post-traumatic experience (2022)
  • Celia Coll - A Particularist Case for Cognitive Literary Value (2022)
  • Eleanor Byrne - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Myalgic Encephalomyelitis: A Philosophical Investigation (2022)
  • Luke Townend - Evaluative Realism and the Argument from Queerness (2022)
  • Zoe Porter - Moral responsibility for unforeseen harms caused by autonomous systems (2022)
  • Martin Bloomfield - A Faith Without Foundation (2022)
  • Britt Harrison - Cinematic Humanism: Cinematic, Dramatic, and Humanistic Value in Fiction Films (2022)
  • David Austin - A Neo-Gricean Account of Assertion: closing the gap between the philosophy of language and the epistemology of testimony (2021)
  • Anu Selvaraj-Thomson - The Love for Learning (2021)
  • Stylianos Panagiotou - A rationalist argument for libertarian free will (2020)
  • Joshua Sijuwade - Functional Monotheism and The Tri-Theism Objection (2020)
  • Nick Courtney - Perceiving What Must Be (2020)
  • Carlos Acosta Gastelum - A Sensible Faith: A Philosophical Reconstruction of the Theology of Charles Chauncy (2019)
  • Jamie Cawthra - Impossible Fiction and the Reader (2019)
  • Adam Timmins - Towards a Realist Philosophy of Historiography (2019)
  • John Blechl - Active Berkeleyanism: Containing an exposition of an improved methodology for Berkeleyan scholarship via a new unified interpretation of Berkeleyanism, with objections and replies (2019)
  • Jack Warman - The Epistemology and Ethics of Epistemic Partiality in Friendship (2019)
  • Omar Payne - Liberty, Strict Equality and Positional Goods (2019) (MA by research)
  • Thippapan Chuosavasdi - Anger in Buddhist Philosophy: In Defence of Eliminativism (2018)
  • Eleanor Byrne - The Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood (2018) (MA by research)
  • Rafael D'Aversa - Moral Arguments and the Frege-Geach Problem (2018)
  • Gordon Haynes - First-Person Perspective and Autistic Spectrum Disorder (2018) (MPhil)
  • Grace Whistler - Between Content and Form: Camus' Literary Ethics (2018)
  • Elisabeth Thorsson - Between Empiricism and Platonism: The Concept of Reason in Locke’s Philosophy (2018)
  • Andy Haggerstone - Language, Fantasy and Story-Telling: How Humans Became Creative (2018)
  • Conny Rhode - Dialogical Empiricism: The Burden of Proof upon Metaphysical Methods (2018)
  • David Worsley - Making Amends: Atonement and the Second-Person (2017)
  • David Price - Application and Ontology in Mathematics: a Defence of Fictionalism (2017)
  • Robert Davies - Self-Knowledge, Memory, and Deliberation (2017)
  • Christopher Hodder - A Structured Approach to the Adam Smith Problem (2016)
  • Joshua Cockayne - Kierkegaard and the God-Relationship (2016)
  • Helen Bradley - Pictorial Representation and the Significance of Style (2016)
  • Louise Moody - Naive Realism, Imaginative Disjunctivism, and the Problem of Misleading Experience (2015)
  • Christopher Robbins - Pascal and the Therapy of Faith (2015)
  • Rosemary Jane Smith - Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism (2015)
  • Suki Finn - Neo-Carnapian Quietism (2015)
  • Mats Volberg - The Foundation and Nature of Contemporary Liberalism (2015)
  • Tae-Kyung Kim - The demonstrative concept, the problem of reference, and the first person (2015)
  • Daniel Molto - Relative identity and logic (2015)
  • Daniel Gustafsson - A Philosophy of Christian Art (2015)
  • Dom Shaw - The Contemporary Relevance of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy (2015)
  • Ken Pepper - Pushing the boundaries of consciousness and cognition (2015)
  • Filippo Contesi - The Disgusting in Art (2014)
  • Rafe McGregor - The Autonomy of Aesthetic Virtue (2014)
  • Richard Tamburro - The Free Actions of Glorified Saints (2014)
  • Ema Sullivan Bissett - Belief, Truth, and Biological Function (2014)
  • Wattaneeporn Kajornprasart - Isaiah Berlin (2014)
  • Brendan Harrington - The pernicious problems of the scheme/content distinction (2014)
  • Jenny Campbell - A second natural analysis of freedom and moral responsibility (2013)
  • David Stocks (MPhil) - The trust between patient and doctor (2012)
  • Bob Clark - A Wittgensteinian perspective on (apparent) problems to do with the applicability of mathematics (2011)
  • Owen Hulatt - Adorno (2011)
  • Vladislav Vojotovic (2011)
  • Robin Dennis - Egocentricity and Objectivity (2011)
  • Richard Flockemann (2011)
  • Rachael Wiseman - Speaking on Oneself (2010)
  • Eva-Maria Düringer - Emotions and Values (2010)
  • Elaine Horner - Leaving the Question of Truth: The Grammar of Colour (2009)
  • Michael John Wilby - How the Folk Make the Mind (2008)
  • Christopher Michael Dowling - The Vindication of Aesthetic Empiricism (2007)
  • Mahlet-Tsigé Getachew - The Redress of Metaphor: A Philosophical Slant (2007)
  • Mark A. Turner - Language, Thought and Psychopathology: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Psychosis (2005)
  • Han-Kyul Kim - John Locke: Agnostic Essentialist, Nominal Dualist, Symmetric Monist. A New Interpretation of His Metaphysics of Mind and Matter (2002)
  • Aliou Tall - From Mathematics in Logic to Logic in Mathematics: Boole and Frege (2002)
  • Stephen Holland - A Critique of John McDowell’s Philosophy of Value (2000)
  • Beth Anne Savickey - Wittgenstein’s Method of Grammatical Investigation (1995)
  • Daniel Douglas Hutto - The Presence of Mind: An Investigation and Defense of Commonsense Psychology (1993)
  • Sonya Sikka - Three Forms of Transcendence: A Study of Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology (1993)
  • Marcus John Towse - Intentionality, Morality and Humanity (1990)
  • Alan Bailey - The Pyrrhonean Way of Sextus Empiricus (1988)
  • Rosemary Newman - Sensibility and the Imagination (1988)
  • Mark William Rowe - Philosophy, Psychology, Criticism: A Defense of Traditional Aesthetics (1986)
  • William John Robinson - Holism, Semantics and Ontology (1984)
  • Colin Stirling - The Foundations of Logical Analyses of Tense (1980)
  • Aletta Ann Barton - The Possibility of Objectivity in Moral Argument: Some Aspects of Utilitarian Morality in the Work of R. M. Hare and Philippa Foot (1979)
  • John Philip Nolan - The Thing-in-Itself in Kant’s Philosophy (1975)
  • John Holliday Lane - The Christian Concept of Mystery in Doctrine. An Examination of John Toland's 'Christianity Not Mysterious' (1696), its Allies and Critics (1974)
  • Roger Martin - Hume on Personal Identity (1974)