News
May 2012: Manchester Philosophy is delighted to announce the appointment of two professors: Helen Beebee and Tim Bayne. Helen Beebee will take up the Samuel Hall chair previously held by the late Peter Goldie. She is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and Head of the School of Philosophy, Theology & Religion. Tim Bayne joins Manchester from Oxford, where he is currently University Lecturer in Philosophy of Mind and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. Helen and Tim will be joining us from autumn 2012 and will enhance our research and teaching strengths in a number of areas, including metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and cognitive science.
April 2012: On Thursday 3 May 2012 we will hold a workshop entitled Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Language. Programme:
11:30am - 1pm Øystein Linnebo (Birkbeck), Reference by Abstraction
1pm - 2:30pm Lunch (own arrangements)
2:30pm - 4pm Penelope Mackie (Nottingham), Sortal Concepts and Modality
4:30pm - 6pm George Bealer (Yale), Analysis and Definition
There is no registration fee. Everyone is welcome. The conference will take place in Theatre 5, Stopford Building, University of Manchester. Please note that the Stopford Building is swipe card access only: all attendees must therefore notify sean.crawford@manchester.ac.uk in advance. The Stopford Building is a short walk (20 mins) from Manchester Oxford Road railway station. For any queries, please contact the organizer, Sean Crawford (sean.crawford@manchester.ac.uk).
March 2012: Congratulations to Gayle Impey on the successful completion of her PhD. The title of Gayle's thesis was Empathy, Motive and Morality: An Enquiry into the Role of Empathy in Ethics.
March 2012: On Thursday 3 May 2012 we will hold a workshop entitled Contemporary Issues in Philosophy of Language. The speakers will be George Bealer (Yale), Øystein Linnebo (Birkbeck), and Penelope Mackie (Nottingham). Everyone is welcome. There is no registration fee. Further particulars will be announced in due course. Please feel free to direct any queries to the organizer, Sean Crawford (sean.crawford@manchester.ac.uk).
March 2012: On 14-15 September 2012 we will be holding a conference to celebrate the work of Peter Goldie, Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester from 2005 until his death in 2011. A call for papers has been issued: submissions from graduate students are particularly welcome. Read the call for papers
February 2012: On Wednesday 21 March, Manchester is hosting a public lecture, 'Feckless reason', given by Dominic McIver Lopes of the University of British Columbia. Prof Lopes will be discussing how philosophy should respond to empirical research on aesthetic response. All are welcome. More details
February 2012: We will be holding a conference in memory of our late colleague Peter Goldie. The conference will take place in Manchester on 14 and 15 September 2012. Speakers will include Dom Lopes, Ronnie de Sousa, Rob Hopkins, Matthew Kieran and Joel Smith. There will also be a call for papers from graduate students. Further details will be announced in due course.
January 2012: We congratulate Phil Brown and Tom Connor on the successful completion of their PhDs. They defended their theses in their vivas this month, and will officially become Dr Brown and Dr Connor in the summer. Tom's thesis was entitled Towards an Understanding of Akrasia; Phil's The Error in Moral Discourse, and What to Do about It.
January 2012: We are offering an AHRC-funded PhD studentship as part of the Knowledge of Emotion research project. The details are available online.
January 2012: Applications are invited for the Samuel Hall Chair in Philosophy, tenable from 1 September 2012.
November 2011: Thanks to a pair of research grants awarded by the AHRC, two new research projects will be beginning at Manchester this academic year. Knowledge of Emotion: Expression and Social Cognition will be directed by Joel Smith and Catharine Abell. It will involve a number of workshops and conferences in a collaborative investigation of the relation between the expression of emotion and our knowledge of the emotional states of others. The project will be interdisciplinary, bringing in researchers from Philosophy, Psychology, and Law. The second project, entitled The Foundations of Ontology, will be directed by David Liggins and Chris Daly. Chris and David will be investigating the nature of philosophical inquiry into what exists, and they will be defending the practice from its leading critics. Both projects will run for three years.
November 2011: Congratulations to Catharine Abell, who has been promoted to the position of Senior Lecturer in Philosophy. Read more about Catharine Abell
November 2011: Congratulations to our PhD student Phil Brown, whose paper 'The possibility of morality' has been accepted for publication in Philosophical Studies.
October 2011: Peter Goldie 1946-2011. We are very sad to report that our colleague Peter Goldie has died of cancer. Peter came to Manchester as the Samuel Hall Professor in Philosophy in 2005, having been a Lecturer and Reader at King’s College, London. His arrival in Manchester marked the return of Philosophy to full Discipline Area status and the revival of a successful graduate programme. Peter’s ground-breaking work in the philosophy of emotions and its application to ethics and aesthetics not only attracted many of our best graduate students, but also prompted colleagues to joint projects and related research. An original thinker and a generous spirit, Peter was an inspiring teacher and an inspiring colleague. He will be greatly missed. Read more about Peter Goldie
October 2011: We are delighted to announce three new appointments. Cynthia Macdonald joins us from Queen's University Belfast as Professor of Philosophy; Phillip Meadows joins us from the University of Keele as Lecturer in Philosophy; and Graham Macdonald joins us at Manchester as Honorary Research Fellow in Philosophy. These appointments further enhance our research and teaching strengths, especially in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of social science.
September 2011: Manchester Philosophy has been ranked 46th in the world, 10th in the UK, in the QS World University Rankings 2011/2012.
June 2011: Manchester philosophers win FP7 funding. Professor John O'Neill, Dr Michael Scott and Professor Peter Goldie, with colleagues in Economics and Psychology in Manchester University and seven partner institutions across Europe, have secured funding from The European Commission under the FP7 funding stream.
The project is concerned with the concept and value of biodiversity. While the importance of biodiversity conservation has been widely acknowledged, there is a gap both at the individual and policy level between the values expressed and actions taken. Michael Scott's research will focus on issues to do with motivation and habit. John O’Neill will examine the limits of monetary valuation as a response to the gap between values and action. Peter Goldie is an advisor on the project. The research will be interdisciplinary across the social sciences drawing on insights from philosophy, environmental economics and psychology.
The FP7 project is called "Motivational strength of ecosystem services and alternative ways to express the value of biodiversity” (Acronym: BIOMOT) and is coordinated by Radboud University in Nijmegen. The project will run for 4 years starting in Sep 2011 and is budgeted at over 3 million Euro. Manchester University will receive approximately half a million euros.
June 2011: Ann Whittle has recieved an AHRC Research Fellowship and will be on leave for the academic year 2011-12.
May 2011: Professor Thomas Uebel will be teaching as a Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna, during May and June.
May 2011: We are pleased to welcome Dr Matteo Plebani (Ca'Foscari, Venice) who is visiting Manchester in May and June to work on the philosophy of mathematics.
January 2011: Julian Dodd is editing a special edition of The Monist on the philosophy of music.
January 2011: Julian Dodd has been made a member of the AHRC peer review college.
September 2010: Congratulations to PhD student Michael Clark, whose paper, 'Inclusionism and the problem of unmarried husbands', is in the latest edition of Erkenntnis (73:1)
September 2010: Chris Daly's new book, An Introduction to Philosophical Methods, is out now with Broadview Press.
September 2010: Professor Peter Goldie's new book (co-authored with Elizabeth Shellekens), Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art, is out now with Routledge.
September 2010: This semester Professor Peter Goldie will be in New Zealand as the visiting Hood Professor at the University of Aukland.
July 2010: Catharine Abell's new collection (co-edited with Katerina Bantinaki), Philosophical Perspectives on Depiction, is out now with OUP.
March 2010: Michael Scott's new collection (co-edited with Graham Oppy), Reading Philosophy of Religion, is out now with Wiley-Blackwell.