Philosophy PhD

Join a research centre of excellence and be part of our collaborative research culture.

Research overview

The department offers supervision for PhD students in a wide range of subject areas, reflecting the expertise of its academic staff.

Key facts

• A mixture of established and emerging areas of philosophy
• All staff are research active and publish regularly in leading journals
• 69% of our research activity recognised as ‘world leading’, or ‘internationally excellent’, with the remainder all of a quality that is ‘recognised internationally’ (REF 2014)

Research areas

We research almost all areas of philosophy but have particular strength in:

• Metaphysics: especially identity; dispositions; causation; modality; essentialism; time; truthmaking; laws of nature; causation; free will; determinism
• Ethics: especially normative theory (particularly consequentialism); metaethics (particularly particularism)
• Mind: especially mental causation; personal identity
• Social philosophy: especially race and gender; epistemic injustice; social kinds
• Aesthetics: especially music
• Language: especially indexicals; theory of reference; speech acts