Research opportunities

The Department of Philosophy has long been involved in the wider community in line with the University's vision to become 'a recognised contributor to the knowledge economy regionally, nationally and internationally'. Its staff regularly give talks to schools and have been featured in the news media.

Our current major project is the AHRC-funded project, running over three years from 2005-2008. The Philosophy Department hosts the RATIO annual one-day conference, which is attended by a large number of people from different universities and has been very successful. It takes place towards the end of April, and consists of several papers by invited speakers.

The proceedings of the conference are published in a special issue of RATIO, an international journal of Analytical Philosophy, which is edited at Reading under the general editorship of John Cottingham.

Past conferences have included:

• Truth in Ethics
• The Rise of Analytical Philosophy
• Equality
• Form and Matter
• Normativity
• Arguing with Derrida
• Meaning and Representation
• The Philosophy of Body
• Metaphysics in Science
• The Self

Speakers have included:

David Wiggins; Bernard Williams; Crispin Wright; Derek Parfit; Jan Narveson; Peter Hacker; John Skorupski; Jonathan Lowe; John Haldane; Peter Simons; Peter Railton; Jacques Derrida; Jerry Fodor; Ernest Lepore; Paul Horwich; Hubert Dreyfus; Onora O'Neill; Joseph Raz; Peter van Inwagen.