Spring Research News

Here’s our periodic update on what some of the staff in the department have been up to, research-wise!

  • James Andow has recently published ‘Lay intuitions about epistemic normativity’ in Synthese, ‘Intuition-talk: Virus or Virtue?’ in Philosophia, ‘A Partial Defence of Descriptive Evidentialism About Intuitions: A Reply to Molyneux’ in Metaphilosophy, and his paper ‘Epistemic Consequentialism, Truth Fairies and Worse Fairies’ has been accepted for publication in Philosophia. He is a co-organiser of ‘Alternative Methods in Experimental Philosophy’ the 8th conference of Experimental Philosophy Group UK which will be held at UEA in July.  James recently presented his research at ‘Empirical approaches to philosophical aesthetics’ in Sheffield.
  • Luke Elson presented two papers concerning nihilism and the reasons to be moral at Groningen in the Netherlands in December. He was also recently awarded an European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship for the 2017-2018 academic year.
  • Nat Hansen is PI for the Leverhulme Research Project Grant “The Psychology of Philosophical Thought Experiments”, which begins April 1. As part of that project, a postdoctoral research fellow will be joining the philosophy department and the Centre for Cognition Research soon (details TBC). Two of Nat’s papers on color terms were published recently: “Color Adjectives, Standards, and Thresholds: An Experimental Investigation” (written with Emmanuel Chemla) was published in Linguistics and Philosophy, and “Color Comparisons and Interpersonal Variation” was published in the Review of Philosophy and Psychology (both are open access). A new paper on 1950s ordinary language philosophy and contemporary experimental philosophy of language, “Must We Measure What We Mean?”, is forthcoming in Inquiry, and Nat’s paper, “Just What Is It That Makes Travis’s Examples So Different, So Appealing?” is forthcoming in a volume of essays on Charles Travis (Collins, Davies, and Dobler, eds.), to be published by OUP. In December, Nat gave a talk at the “Metaphor, Meaning, and Maimonides” conference at the University of Chicago and attended the Arizona State experimental philosophy conference in Sedona, Arizona. In January, he gave a talk at the Fellows Workshop at Stanford University’s Humanities Center. In May, he will give talks at the Semantics and Pragmatics workshop at Stanford, at Lawrence University in Wisconsin, and he will attend the California Philosophy Workshop in Los Angeles. Nat will also be participating remotely in the Centre for Cognition Research’s summer seminar series at Reading, which begins May 9.
  • Prof. Max de Gaynesford has recently presented at the University of Nantes (on the self) and will be giving the keynote address at a conference at the University of Warwick (on the philosophy of poetry). He has recently published an article on Wittgenstein and the Self, and his book on poetry and philosophy (‘The Rift In The Lute’) is about to be published.
  • Prof. David Oderberg recently debated Prof. Jeff McMahan at Oxford on the morality of assisted suicide, and gave a paper at the University of Zurich on the impossibility of natural necessity. His article, ‘Further Clarity on Cooperation and Morality’ was recently published as a Feature Article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, with peer commentaries and a response. He has just followed that up with an article entitled ‘Co-operation in the Age of Hobby Lobby: When Sincerity is Not Enough’, in a special issue on conscience and co-operation for the online journal Expositions, published at Villanova University.
  • Prof. Philip Stratton-Lake has recently published “Self-evidence, Understanding and Intuition”, in Shafer-Landau, R., (ed) Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and Parfit and Schroeder on the Weight of Reasons” in Kirchin (ed), S., Reading Parfit, Routledge. He also gave a public lecture on happy, good, and meaningful lives.
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