Research Group: Philosophy of Language, Logic and Metaphysics
Philosophers at Southampton have published widely on issues in these areas and at their intersection.
Group Overview
We have particular interests and strength in rule-following; meaning holism; inferentialism; linguistic normativity; pejoratives; the logic and semantics of conditionals; fictional characters, empty names and nonexistence; the metaphysics of art; meta-ontology; and the metaphysics of persons and of pregnancy.
Research by Southampton staff has appeared in recent years in numerous international journals, including Analysis, Analytic Philosophy, British Journal of Aesthetics, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, dialectica, European Journal of Philosophy, Erkenntnis, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Mind and Language, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Ratio, The Review of Symbolic Logic, and Thought. See our publication list for more details
Recent and upcoming events include a series of works on Cultural and Social Ontology , Study Day on the metaphysics of art, and Loving, Wondering, Knowing , a conference on non-propositional attitudes and their reports. In addition, Southampton is presently home to a major project on the metaphysics of pregnancy , supported by a granto of aproximately £1m grant.
A number of our metaphysicians were interviewed recently about their work and their views by the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Current Research Student Profile: Javier Gonzalez De Prado Salas
"I work mainly on the philosophy of language and mind. My research focuses on practice-based accounts of meaning. In particular, I am working on inferentialist approaches to representation. I am also interested in the relations between inferentialism and contextualist perspectives on thought and language. I have presented my research on inferentialism at numerous conferences in Europe, and my work on contextualism at the 2013 European Society for Philosophy and Psychology, and my (with Jesús Zamora Bonilla) 'Collective Actors without Collective Minds: an Inferentialist Approach' is forthcoming in Philosophy of the Social Sciences."
Research Staff
| Staff Member | Primary Position |
|---|---|
| Giulia Felappi | Lecturer, Internationalisation and Study Abroad Officer, Doctoral Programmes Director |
| Alexander Geddes | Research Fellow |
| Elselijn Kingma | Associate Professor |
| Denis McManus | Professor, Head of Department |
| Ray Monk | Professor Emeritus |
| Andrew Stephenson | Lecturer |
| Naomi Thompson | Lecturer |
| Lee Walters | Associate Professor, Head of Research, Equality Officer |
| Daniel Whiting | Professor, Outreach Officer |