Research

Our department is one of the leading philosophy departments in the UK, with researchers working in most of the major areas of philosophy.

The department's research staff is comprised of twenty permanent members, plus a number of post-doctoral researchers. The department is dedicated to high-quality academic research, and scored highly in the recent REF.

Staff members' research interests are diverse, spanning all of the major areas of philosophy, and with numerous inter-disciplinary links. In recent years the department has hosted a number of major research projects, with external funding from the Wellcome Institute, the ERC, the AHRC, and the Leverhulme Trust, among others. The department puts on regular workshops, seminars and conferences, and welcomes a regular stream of visiting scholars from around the world. 

The department is particularly noted for its strength in the philosophy of science, logic and mathematics, for which it is one of the major centres in the English-speaking world. The department is home to the Centre for Science and Philosophy, which promotes the interpretation of science through collaboration with other disciplines, and to the Centre for Health, Humanities and Science, which promotes work at the intersection of philosophy and the medical sciences. Other areas of research strength include ethics and political philosophy, history of philosophy, and philosophy of mind and language.

For more details about our research see our people profiles.

Research areas

  • Epistemology: formal epistemology and decision theory, epistemic utility theory.
  • Ethics and Political  Philosophy: virtue ethics, Kantian ethics.
  • History of Philosophy: Kant, Heidegger, Leibniz, Aristotle.
  • Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics: theories of truth, self-reference and paradoxes, structuralism.
  • Philosophy of Biology: foundations of evolutionary theory, social evolution, explanation in genetics and molecular biology.
  • Philosophy of Medicine: the nature of illness, the phenomenology of health
  • Philosophy of Mind and Language: representation, fictional objects, formal semantics.
  • Philosophy of Physics: space and time, foundations of quantum mechanics, chaos and dynamical systems.
  • Philosophy of Science: realism and anti-realism, the metaphysics of science, induction and probability, values in science.

Projects

Collaborations

Collaborations with other University of Bristol departments

Staff are actively engaged in research collaborations with colleagues in physics, biology, medicine, economics, politics, mathematics and anthropology.

The Department of Philosophy hosts and is involved in the following research centres:

Collaborations with other Philosophy departments

The department has strong research ties with a number of philosophy departments in the UK, Europe and the USA. In recent years, joint events have been held with the University of Oxford, the University of Groningen, and LMU Munich.

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