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Department of Philosophy

Staff Research Interests

Palace Green Library

Palace Green Library

We are a pluralistic and friendly department, which accommodates work in 'analytic', 'Continental' and non-Western philosophical traditions. Current research by our staff and postgraduate students spans a notably diverse range of philosophical, historical and interdisciplinary topics. It is focused around the activities of five research groups/clusters:


Below is a list of staff and their primary interest areas.  Not only does this indicate the breadth of research in the department, it is a good guide for prospective students looking for specialist supervision for their research project.

  • Dr Matthew Eddy - Seventeenth- to nineteenth-century forms of scientific representation and argumentation including historical conceptions of mind, memory, matter, time, language, visuality, informatics, human origins and religion.
  • Dr SA Gambaudo - Gender/feminism, Janet Frame, Julia Kristeva, psychoanalysis.
  • Dr SC Gibb - Mental causation, categories of being, causation and Laws.
  • Dr AJ Hamilton - Aesthetics, history of analytic philosophy, philosophy of mind, political philosophy especially liberalism, Wittgenstein.
  • Dr RF Hendry - History and philosophy of quantum physics and chemistry, scientific method and rationality, scientific realism and anti-realism.
  • Dr Simon Paul James - Environmental philosophy, the philosophy of Buddhism, phenomenology (especially Heidegger's work and that of Merleau-Ponty), virtue ethics (especially environmental virtue ethics).
  • Dr Ian James Kidd - Epistemology, ethics, history of philosophy and science C18-20, philosophy of medicine, philosophy of religion, philosophy of Science.
  • Professor EJ Lowe - Contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of logic and language, philosophy of mind and action, the philosophy of John Locke.
  • Professor Holger Maehle - Ethical issues in the history of medicine, history of medicine and the life sciences, history of pharmacology.
  • Professor Matthew Ratcliffe - Phenomenology, intersubjectivity and folk psychology, emotions, feelings and moods, the body, the sense of touch, psychiatric illness (particularly depression), and situated cognition.
  • Professor GF Scarre - Moral philosophy (especially utilitarianism), death, forgiveness, evil, John Stuart Mill.
  • Dr Elisabeth Schellekens - Aesthetics, emotions, ethics (including moral psychology), philosophy of Kant, philosophy of mind.
  • Dr J Westerhoff - Metaphysics and philosophy of language, Indo-Tibetan philosophy (Madhyamaka), history of ideas (16th and 17th Century).


Research Staff:


Emeritus Staff:


Associated Staff:

Durham Research Community

Durham University has specialists in many areas of philosophy.  If you would like to work with world-leading academics in an area which fascinates you, please have a look through our postgraduate degree programs here.