The annual newsletter is one of the ways the Department tries to communicate useful information to students and to let you know about any changes that have occurred in the Philosophy Department. If you have any suggestions about what you’d like to hear about in future newsletters, please do let me know (e.g.n.borg@reading.ac.uk).
Welcome (back) to everyone and good
luck with your studies this year!
Emma Borg
Head of Department, Philosophy
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The Department is delighted to welcome Dr James Stazicker and Dr Nat Hansen to the Department starting this autumn. We are also excited to announce that Professor Gabriel Segal is joining us for the 2012-13 academic year, and welcome him to the Department.
Staff profiles of our new colleagues can be found here:
Legendary billionaire investor Jim Rogers extols the value of studying philosophy
Philosophy at Reading:
At the end of 2008, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, in collaboration with the funding councils for the rest of the United Kingdom, released the results of the official audit of the quality of research in the UK’s higher education institutions.
The Department of Philosophy at the University of Reading achieved an outstanding result.
Each higher education department entered for the assessment had to submit a report on its research activity since the last exercise in 2001, including information about its graduate programme (including training and placement), grant awards, conferences held, and the professional activities (‘esteem’) of its staff members.
In addition, each member of staff in the department, if entered for assessment as part of the departmental submission, was required to submit samples of their publications (‘research outputs’) for assessment.
The assessment panel consisted of 16 experts, all professional philosophers in the UK, whose job was to judge all aspects of research within the department and provide a grade reflecting its quality.
Various aspects of research were weighted to reflect their importance within the overall quality profile, with by far the largest weighting being given to the quality of the publications submitted.
All publications were read by the panel experts without reference to where they were published. The judgments were based solely on the quality of the work presented to them.
The panel then classified the research activity in the department as either 4* (world leading), 3* (international excellent), 2* (internationally recognised), 1* (nationally recognised) or 0 (sub standard).
The results for the Department of Philosophy at the University of Reading are as follows. Note that the Department submitted every one of its full-time, permanent members of staff, unlike many other departments:
This represents an outstanding achievement by the Department, placing us in the top handful of the UK’s philosophy departments for research.
All sessions begin at 2.15pm on Tuesdays unless otherwise stated. Open to staff and graduate students; others may request special permission to attend from either the speaker or the organiser of the meeting (Prof. David Owens). Location: Humss 25.
Sessions are at 11am on Thursdays in room G73, HumSS. Open to staff and PhD students in the Department.
The schedule for the Spring Term is available here.
Topic: Unbelievable Errors: An error theory about all normative judgements. Led by Dr. Bart Streumer. Sessions are at 2pm on Thursdays in room G73, HumSS. Open to graduate students in the Department.
There’s a schedule for the term available here.
Sessions are at 1pm on Thursdays in HumSS 287. The book this term is Ronald Dworkin’s Justice for Hedgehogs, and the organizer is Dr Alex Gregory. Open to graduate students in the Department and interested visitors.
There are videos of some interesting debates and talks about philosophical issues here, on the Institute of Arts and Ideas website.