Staff profile

Departmental Roles

I will be Director of Undergraduate Studies during Michelmas term, 2016.

Research Interests and Biography

I completed a PhD on the philosophy of Adorno. The project began as an investigation into his aesthetics and finished more as an analysis of the metaphysical and epistemological commitments of his philosophical project. I then considered how those commitments were mediated by his aesthetics.

As my PhD broadened in philosophical scope, so did my philosophical interests. Unsurprisingly, I am interested in the history of German Idealism and the influence of Kant and Hegel. However, I became interested in epistemology and metaphysics in their own right - particularly contemporary metaphysics. Consequently my work is now no longer confined to so-called continental philosophy; I also work on contemporary analytic metaphysics and am interested how metaphysics impacts on the social and value spheres more generally.

I am currently working on papers on Adorno's critique of nominalism, drawing upon historical as well as contemporary metaphysics to aid the analysis. This fits into a broader program of trying to provide a more detailed account of neglected areas of Adorno's thinking. In particular, how Adorno's semantics works, and how to understand his view of logic. Again, I'm looking towards contemporary work in both fields to provide resources for thinking about these areas of Adorno's philosophy.

More broadly, I am also working on a model of aesthetic realism about artworks drawing upon Adorno's work and contemporary metaphysics. 

I have a broad portfolio of teaching as a result of my diverse research interests which span both the continental and analytic traditions. I have taught Aesthetics, German Idealism, Critical Theory, Philosophy of Language, Logic, Metaphysics, Existentialism, Feminism and Political Philosophy amongst others.

• Aesthetics, Adorno, Critical Theory, Post-Kantian Philosophy, Contemporary Metaphysics

• History of Philosophy

Journal Article

• Cattien, Jana & Stopford, Richard (2022). Eerie. Angelaki 27(5): 113.
• Cattien, Jana & Stopford, Richard John (2022). The appropriating subject: Cultural appreciation, property and entitlement. Philosophy & Social Criticism
• Stopford, Richard (2021). Threshold concepts and certainty: a critical analysis of ‘troublesomeness’. Higher Education 82(1): 163-179.
• Stopford, Richard (2020). Teaching feminism: Problems of critical claims and student certainty. Philosophy & Social Criticism 46(10): 1203-1224.