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Department of Philosophy

Staff

Dr Christopher Cowie

Personal web page

Assistant Professor/Admissions Officer in the Department of Philosophy

(email at christopher.d.cowie@durham.ac.uk)

Departmental Roles

  • Admissions Tutor (UG)
  • Co-Director of Ethics Research Cluster

Office Hours

In term time, Tuesdays 2-5pm, or by appointment. Rm 004 Old Elvet 50-51.

Research Summary

I work in moral philosophy. I am interested in the nature of moral norms and standards. Why we should care about them? How, if at all, can we think systematically about them?

I have just finished a manuscript on the relationship between morality and epistemology: Moral Judgment and Epistemic Judgment: The Argument from Analogy, now under contract with OUP. If you would like to read it, please email me. I'm happy to send a draft. Many of the issues are discussed in prior pieces in Philosophical Quarterly, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Synthese and in collections (see below).

 I am also currently co-editing a collection on a similar theme – Companions in Guilt Arguments in Metaethics – with Richard Rowland. This will be forthcoming shortly. For a summary of the kinds of issues discussed in that collection see my Philosophy Compass piece (below).

I also work on more traditional issues in Moral Philosophy. I have published on measures of welfare – in Sustainable Development - and on axiology – in Philosophical Studies. I will be focusing on this side of things a bit more over the next few years: I am currently writing a book on The Repugnant Conclusion for Routledge’s Focus on Philosophy series. I am especially interested in how traditional questions in population and axiology interact with questions about the quality of human life: Are our lives, on balance good for us or bad for us? How would you tell? Do these questions even make sense?

Prior to coming to Durham, I was a Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. I took my PhD at Cambridge under the supervision of Professor Hallvard Lillehammer, graduating in 2014.

Upcoming Talks (2018/19)

- Morality, Epistemic Judgmentand Kinds of Probability. Invited Seminar. University of Cyprus. September 2018.

- Moral Theory and Population Axiology. Santa Fe Institute Workshop on Demography and Applied Population Ethics. October 2018.

- Title TBC. Pre-Read Seminar. University of Edinburgh. November 2018.

- Title TBC. Departmental Seminar. University of Sheffield. March 2019.

Research Interests

  • Epistemology
  • Metaethics
  • Moral Philosophy
  • Political Philosophy

Teaching Areas

  • Ethics (MA)
  • Moral Theory
  • Political Philosophy

Publications

Authored book

  • (Forthcoming). Moral and Epistemic Judgment: The Argument from Analogy. (Under Contract with Oxford University Press).
  • (Forthcoming). The Repugnant Conclusion (Under contract with Routledge).

Chapter in book

  • Jussi Suikkanen (Forthcoming). Metanormativity as a Method. In Methodology and Moral Philosophy. Routledge.
  • Cowie, Christopher & Greenberg, Alexander (2018). Constitutivism about Epistemic Normativity. In Epistemic Realism and Antirealism: Approaches to Metaepistemology. McKenna, Robin & Kyriacou, Christos Palgrave Macmillan.

Edited book

  • Christopher Cowie & Richard Rowland (Forthcoming). Companions in Guilt Arguments in Metaethics (Under contract with Routledge).

Journal Article