Heythrop College has a thriving research student community, with around 35 students spread across the three departments. The descriptions of research projects given on this page provide a sense of the wide range of interests among the current student body of the Philosophy department. Many students are attached to one of our Centres or Institutes, where appropriate.

Robin Barden
Kevin Dillon
Edward Horton
Christopher Humphries
Miroslav Imbrisevic   
Marthe Kerkwijk  
Walter King
Joanne Lovesey
Tom Morris
Rachel Paine
Sarah Pawlett  
Binod Soreng

'The Content of Perceptual States'

My PhD research is in the field of the Philosophy of Perception. I am interested in the content and phenomenology of perceptual mental states. The aim of my research is to advance our understanding of what it means for perceptual states to have correctness conditions, and of what is the relation between the content defined by those conditions and the phenomenology of the associated mental states. This involves analysis and assessment of the claims of naïve realists, sense-data theorists and intentionalists. One of the themes of my research is the essentially approximative nature of perceptual content and the impact that has on the issues in point. My MPhilStud research project was on the phenomenology of pain.

'Carlos S. Nino's Consensual Theory of Punishment: An Evaluation and a Defence.'

My research is in the fields of political and legal philosophy, with a focus on the work of the Argentinian legal scholar Carlos S. Nino.

Further details are available at: http://heythrop.academia.edu/MiroslavImbrisevic/About

Published papers:

'Gaunilo's Cogito Argument', in The Saint Anselm Journal, Vol. 5.1, 2007, pp. 1-7;

'Why is (Claiming) Ignorance of the Law no Excuse?', in The Review Journal of Political Philosophy, Vol. 8.1, 2010, pp. 57-69;

'The Consent Solution to Punishment and the Explicit Denial Objection', in Theoria, Vol. 68, 2010, pp. 211-224.

Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action and religious plurality in contemporary Europe

Habermas can bee seen as one of the major thinkers in contemporary political thought in Europe. His Theory of Communicative Action (1981) provides a complex and elegant account on how rational agents in a society should coordinate action: by means of communicative rationality, a practice of free argumentation and reason-giving with the aim of reaching mutual understanding and consensus.

This theory has influenced Habermas' later work on religion in the public sphere and deliberative democracy. But European society has changed since 1981. What the appropriate place of religion in the public sphere should be is by no means clear, and particularly Islam forms a controversial example. Misunderstandings and misinterpretations seem often to interfere with reasonable decision making on topics related to religion in the public sphere.

But can Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action really help us to understand these phenomena, or does his focus on reason exclude important religious phenomena with political relevance that may have a meaning that cannot be fully grasped in rational terms?

'Edmund Burke’s understanding of liberty and its relevance today.'

The republican tradition has played an important part in modern understandings of liberty. The partnership of the historian, Quentin Skinner, and the philosopher, Philip Pettit, has been immensely fruitful.  However, Pettit’s exclusion of any account of religious experience from reasonable discussion excludes many for whom such exclusion is not acceptable.  Burke is one of the great defenders of a religious understanding of republican liberty, and his voice needs to be heard in the current debate.

'Sartre, Buber and Levinas: Intersubjectivity and Transcendence'

Over the course of the MPhil Stud I have researched in the areas of Philosophy of Religion - looking at panentheism and at the contribution Heidegger's Being and Time can be said to have made to Philosophy of Religion. In research in Ethics I have looked at moral projectivism and at and work on the second-person standpoint in ethics. My third set of papers have been on the philosophy of Nietzsche, specifically looking at the themes of perspectivism and of redemption in his works. My thesis work is a comparative analysis of Sartre, Buber and Levinas on the theme of intersubjectivity and an exploration of some of the questions that arise from this.

'Semantic issues in religious disagreement'

The aim of this project is to determine the extent to which a semantic interpretation of religious disagreement can throw light into the current discussion in the area of disagreement. Authors like Richard Feldman, David Christensen, Alvin I Goldman, Peter Van Inwagen, Richard Folley, Thomas Kelley and Linda Zagzebski deal with the epistemology of disagreement. Similarly Paul Griffiths and others deal with religious disagreement from the perspective of apologetics; and Christopher McMahon chooses to address disagreement from the perspective of political morality. The area of disagreement in short, is a very well established field. The accounts on disagreement develop an idea of reasonable disagreement based on the uniqueness thesis propounded by Richard Feldman and well supported by others. The debate centres on key concepts like epistemic peer and epistemic virtues like self-trust, tolerance and autonomy. They raise issues like reasonable disagreement, epistemic relativism, peer-disagreement, inter-doctrinal differences, and the necessity of inter-religious apologetics.

However, the epistemology of disagreement to certain extent neglects the importance of the need to interpret the other person’s claim, even before the situation can be regarded as one of disagreement. This is where the semantic considerations can make inroads into the subject and throw new insights in order to complement the current engagement on disagreement. This could be explored through the work done on the Principle of Charity by Donald Davidson and via the work on Contextualism in Philosophy of Language.