For details of staff research interests, see individuals' web pages.
Follow this link to find out about areas of research and graduate supervision.
Members of the Philosophy Department give many public presentations of their work to specialist and non-specialist audiences alike. Follow this link for some recent podcasts.
What is harm? Or, when is it correct to say that a person, or a thing has been harmed? I defend a familiar account against a recently advanced rival. I claim –a) all and only things having a good of their own – people, animals, plants – can be harmed; b) they enter a harmed condition when their level of well-being becomes less good than it would have been, were some harming event not to have occurred; c) harm involves ones undergoing some intrinsic change – relational change isn’t enough.
Three important consequences of this: death can harm us; there are no posthumous harms; undiscovered betrayal doesn’t harm us.
What can justify these claims? I contend that all there is to harm is what, ordinarily but after reflection, we want to say about it. Hence my title, and the familiarity of much of what I say. An alternative account, that we need a philosophical investigation into the nature of harm, is one that I consider and reject.
This talk will be of interest to all those needing to know what harm is, and when it occurs.
Time: 2.00pm
Venue: Open University Milton Keynes Campus, Faculty of Arts, Meeting Room 11, Wilson A, second floor.
All welcome.
Follow this link for further details of our 2012-13 seminar programme
Members of the department belong to one or more informal research groups in Philosophy of Mind and Language, Philosophy and Public Policy, and the History of Philosophy. These groups host research events at regular intervals throughout the year. Speakers at these and at the regular Departmental Research Seminars have, in recent years, included:
Chris Bertram (Bristol)
Emma Borg (Reading)
Nick Bostrom (Oxford)
Timothy Chappell (Dundee)
Tim Crane (UCL)
Stephen Davies (Auckland)
Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck)
Peter Goldie (KCL)
Robert Hanna (Colorado at Boulder)
Rob Hopkins (Sheffield)
Dan Isaacson (Oxford)
Nick Jardine (Cambridge)
Ward Jones (Rhodes)
Susan Mendus (York)
Adrian Moore (Oxford)
David Owens (Sheffield)
Jennifer Saul (Sheffield)
Anthony Savile (LSE)
Tom Stoneham (York)
Alan Thomas (Kent)
Edward Winters (Westminster)
For details of upcoming research events, please contact the Department of Philosophy by email: Arts-Philosophy-Enqs@open.ac.uk.
Other external speakers, including many international visitors, have given talks to a more formal research group on Mind, Meaning and Rationality. Details can be found on the group's webpages.
In addition to research talks, external philosophers give lectures to Open University students and tutors as part of our residential schools, in particular AXR271: Doing Philosophy. Guest Lecturers in recent years have included:
Alexander Bird (Bristol)
Michael Clark (Nottingham)
Sean Crawford (Lancaster)
Alice Drewery (Reading)
Robert Frazier (Oxford)
David Owens (Sheffield)
Michael Rosen (Oxford)
Barry Smith (Birkbeck)
Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
Jonathan Woolf (UCL)
Finally, philosophers often visit the OU at the invitation of one of the many philosophers or academics with strong philosophical interests based in other departments, including Art History, Computing, Economics, and Mathematics. For example, Baroness Onora O'Neill (Cambridge) spoke on the nature and ethics of trust to the Computing Research Centre.