Research in Philosophy

We have an active research community which is strongly committed to delivering the highest quality of philosophical research and which also ensures that postgraduates are well integrated into our research culture.

The department combines research excellence in all core areas of philosophy, with distinction in number of specialty areas and strengths in many interdisciplinary areas. The department hosts the Birmingham Centre for Philosophy of Religion, and we host a number of research themes, bringing together the expertise of a number of staff from across the university and offering our postgraduates a supportive and well-connected environment in which to study.

Our research projects

  • Deluded by Experience

    Our beliefs shape our understanding of the world and our success or failure in interacting with it.

  • Context Sensitivity in Natural Language

    According to the classical paradigm in philosophy of language, to understand the meaning of a sentence is to know what the world would need to be like for the sentence to be true.

  • Building Bridges in Ethics

    Project on bridging the gap between theoretical and empirical studies of religion, which up to now have developed separately, as the studies of beliefs and the studies of practices.

  • FraMEPhys

    A five year research project developing a new account of the contribution of metaphysics to how physics explains our world.

  • Higher Order Metaphysics

    We examine the metaphysics of higher-order quantification, and applications of higher-order resources to the foundational problems of mainstream analytic metaphysics, about the nature of properties, possible worlds, propositions, facts, and truth.

  • Pantheism and Panentheism

    The project will address three of the most pressing challenges for these two views: the problem of personhood, the problem of unity, and the problem of evil.

  • Global Philosophy of Religion

    The philosophy of religion addresses the most fundamental issues concerning religious concepts, beliefs and practice.

Department of Philosophy