This page is intended to help those interested in studying philosophy as a research student at the Open University identify a potential supervisor.

Areas of research and graduate supervision in the Open University Philosophy Department

Alex Barber
Ethics, including metaethics, normative, applied; ethical topics that overlap with other areas of philosophy, such as philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of mind, political philosophy.

Dan Cavedon-Taylor
Philosophy of mind and psychology, in particular perception and related sensory states; philosophy of art and aesthetics, in particular the visual arts and the nature of aesthetic judgment; social epistemology.

Azita Chellappoo
Philosophy of biology, medicine and science, in particular boundaries between the biological and the social, concepts of health and disease and the nature of cultural evolution; feminist philosophy; philosophy of race and decolonial theory.

Sophie Grace Chappell
Normative ethics, applied ethics, metaethics; ancient philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle; epistemology; philosophy of religion; philosophy of mind and action; feminist philosophy and philosophy of gender.

Cristina Chimisso
History of philosophy, especially late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; French philosophy; history of philosophy of science; philosophy of science, especially in the French tradition; historical epistemology, historiography; sociology of scientific knowledge.

Sean Cordell
Moral, social and political philosophy and their intersections; applied ethics; virtue ethics (ancient and contemporary); the ethics of social roles; the nature, agency and/or morality of social groups and organisations.

Manuel Dries
Post-Kantian European Philosophy, in particular 19th and 20th-century German and French philosophy; ethics; philosophy of mind.

Derek Matravers
Aesthetics: in particular, the philosophy of fiction and narrative, and the philosophy of conservation (that is, the conservation of artefacts rather than the conservation of nature).

Jon Pike
Philosophy of sport, including the ethics of doping and anti-doping, the definition, metaphysics and value of sport, and related issues in applied ethics; political philosophy; and moral philosophy as it impinges on the political.

Mark Pinder
Philosophy of language; philosophical methodology, especially conceptual engineering; epistemology; philosophical logic.