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.
Lara Jost
Lara’s research interests intersect epistemology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of mind and medical ethics. She is particularly interested in the injustice towards marginalised groups when it comes to knowledge, and how taking affective experience seriously as a source of justification could improve their lives. In her thesis, she focuses on three applied phenomena: microaggressions, white scepticism and testimony from patients who suffer from lesser-known illnesses, like endometriosis.
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.
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.
Atul Satija
Atul’s primary interests lie in the philosophy of emotion and the philosophy of language and mind. His thesis is on the relation between the fittingness-conditions of emotions and truth-conditions of beliefs.
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.
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.