Nick Allen
Nick’s PhD research is on the intersection between Feminist Epsitemology and Meta-ethics. More specifically, he suspects that many of the issues found in mainstream epistemology, which are discussed by feminist epistemologists, may also occur in mainstream meta-ethics (or at least analogous problems). Nick hopes to employ the lessons of feminist epistemology, in combination with existing feminist meta-ethical research, in order to create a feminist critical account of mainstream meta-ethics along these lines.
Katherine Crone
Katherine’s research focuses on moral philosophy, aesthetics, and emotions. What holds these together is an interest in justificatory reasons and value theory. She is also interested in feminist and social philosophy.
Rasa Davadiciute
Rasa’s primary research interests are in political and legal theory, applied ethics and philosophy of culture. Her thesis investigates the viability of presenting obligations to preserve cultural heritage as human rights. She also has a keen interest in international criminal law, especially as it relates to the prosecution of crimes involving cultural heritage destruction.
Viviane Fairbank
Viviane’s primary research is on logical expressivism, the normativity of logic, and the notion of objectivity in the philosophy of logic. She is also interested in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of science, and she previously worked as a magazine journalist with a focus on journalism ethics.
Enrico Galvagni
Enrico’s main research interests include early modern philosophy, ethics, and its history. His Ph.D. project focuses primarily on David Hume’s theory of virtue and contemporary Hume-inspired moral theories. In the past, Enrico has been a DAAD fellow at the Göttingen Institute of Advanced Study and the University of Cologne (Germany) where he has worked on the French Enlightenment, which remains one of his prominent interests.
Jakob Hinze
Jakob’s main research interests are in the area of democratic theory, especially epistemic democracy, the relation of knowledge and political power, and the significance of disagreement in public discourse. In particular, he wants to investigate if and to what extent the concept of epistemic peerhood is applicable to politics, and whether an individual’s share of the political power should hinge on that person’s amount of knowledge about public issues.
Joel Joseph
Joel’s primary interests are in moral and political philosophy. His thesis is on the ethics of assisting wild animals.
Nick Kuespert
Nick works at the intersection of social epistemology and metaethics. Their PhD is on the epistemic significance of moral agreement and disagreement. In particular, they are interested in whether (and if so, how) our reactions to agreement and disagreement with others should differ when it comes to moral matters rather than non-moral issues. They also have interests in feminist philosophy and formal epistemology. When not doing philosophy, Nick is a passionate climber and enjoys hiking.
David MacDonald
David’s PhD is on the ethics of sex; primarily questions on the nature of consent. David’s thesis seeks to describe in more detail what our duties of due diligence are to respect others’ consent, and to define when agents are responsible for negligently believing that their sexual partner is consenting when this is not the case. David’s other research interests include consent more generally, particularly when used for theories of political obligation/legitimacy.
Colin McLean
Colin’s research focuses primarily on the limits of public policy within broadly liberal societies. His thesis concerns the justification of policies that explicitly aim to influence the normative commitments of persons, with reference to topics such as the foundations of liberal political morality, the nature of liberal freedom, and the significance of value pluralism.
Miguel De La Cal Moreno
Miguel (he/any) works on issues in political philosophy and climate ethics. He has a strong interest in feminist philosophy, revolutionary traditions, and social epistemology. He is currently researching how climate change affects our conception of a good life, and how protests can help us find meaning in these troubled times. When he is not doing philosophy he enjoys watching movies (and discussing!), climbing, and taking care of community gardens.
Johannes Nickl
Johannes‘ main research interests lie in the field of Kant’s ethics. In his PhD thesis, he focuses on Kant’s conception of conscience. He aims at shedding light on the question to what extent Kant’s ethical theory relies on conscience and how the latter bears a positive effect on an agent’s morality. Related to this topic, he is particularly interested in the role of moral feelings (e.g., sympathy), questions of moral motivation, and the demandingness of moral duties to oneself. His further interests include the ancient Greek philosophy, normative ethics, and legal philosophy.
He is supervised by Jens Timmermann and Simon Hope.
Paul Retallick
Paul’s PhD focuses on the limits of extreme demand: the view that we are morally obligated to give all non-essential resources to charity. He is also interested in Effective Altruism, Longtermism and normative ethics. He is haunted by the idea that metaethical non-cognitivism is true and makes all of his work redundant.
Amiya Hashkes
Amiya’s main research interes
ts are epistemology, ethics, and the intersections and parallels between the two. Her doctoral dissertation is supervised by Jessica Brown, and concerns the relationship between understanding and epistemic responsibility; Amiya believes that the responsibility we bear for our beliefs has consequences for a number of debates in social epistemology, such as the conditions under which we ought (or ought not) to accept testimony. Other topics she is working on include epistemic challenges in metaethics, and the ways in which epistemic fallibilism can be used to respond to a variety of philosophical challenges
Lara Scheibli
Lara’s main research interests lie in epistemology, feminist philosophy, moral philosophy, and the intersections of those fields. Her doctoral thesis on the epistemology of #BelieveWomen is supervised by Jessica Brown. Lara is also interested in the ethics of consent, the history of utilitarianism, and social ontology.
Luca Stroppa
Luca Stroppa’s primary interests are population ethics, moral theories and wellbeing theories. His research focuses on what makes the difference between a life worth living and a life worth not living, and is an attempt to challenge some background assumptions in Population Ethics in order to make some progress towards a population axiology. He is also interested in personal identity, infinite ethics and logical puzzles such as Sorites arguments and spectrum arguments.
Darcey Merison
Darcey’s main research interests are Plato and Aristotle, and her PhD focuses on Aristotelian moral psychology: she is particularly interested in the relationship between emotions and persuasion, and how this relationship intersects with the cultivation of virtuous citizens.
Steven John Warden
Steven is an MLitt student who is interested in the nature of values and valuing, and of the relationship of values to a bundle of related concepts such as virtue, happiness, purpose and practical rationality. He finds important the work of Foot and others in the Aristotelian tradition, but also thinks lessons can be drawn for this project from thinkers like Williams and Nietzsche, who emphasise the central role of the valuing subject.
Dante Clementi
Dante is a PhD candidate in the School of Divinity, writing a thesis on the relation between language and silence in Kierkegaard’s religious philosophy. Aside from Kierkegaard, Dante’s interests include the respective intersections between art and ethics and between the philosophy of religion and moral philosophy, the experience of value, and meaning in life and its relation to selfhood, the transcendent, and beauty
Emilia Wilson
Emilia Wilson is a PhD candidate in the department of philosophy working primarily at the intersection of feminist epistemology and philosophy of language. Her thesis explores the way in which our conceptual resources become imbued with social meaning and the role this plays in upholding (unjust) social practices. Emilia is also interested in social ontology, conceptual engineering/ethics and ethics.
Patrick J. Winther-Larsen
Patrick’s area of specialization is moral responsibility and he wrote his master’s thesis on the ethics of third-party blame. For his doctoral project, he plans to investigate this topic further. He also has an interest in the history of philosophy (particularly the works of Plato and Kant), as well as the philosophy of art.
Jacob Librizzi
Jacob Librizzi specializes in metaethics, rationality, and the nature of normativity in non-realist frameworks. His doctoral project focuses on distinguishing metanormative constructivism as a genuine alternative to both realism and expressivism. Central to this project is the nature of conferred properties and evaluative classification. Related interests include Kantian ethics, constitutivist strategies for normative explanation, and what justifies universalist commitments in moral thinking.
Percy Zhao
Percy’s research primarily focuses on moral philosophy, and animal ethics in particular. His Ph.D. project is on the meta-ethical question of the grounding for moral status, and how to understand the moral status of animals on that basis.