Department of Philosophy

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External Speakers

Members of the department belong to one or more informal research groups in Philosophy of Mind and Language, Philosophy and Public Policy, and the History of Philosophy. These groups host research events at regular intervals throughout the year. Speakers at these and at the regular Departmental Research Seminars have, in recent years, included:

Chris Bertram (Bristol)
Emma Borg (Reading)
Nick Bostrom (Oxford)
Timothy Chappell (Dundee)
Tim Crane (UCL)
Stephen Davies (Auckland)
Miranda Fricker (Birkbeck)
Peter Goldie (KCL)
Robert Hanna (Colorado at Boulder)
Rob Hopkins (Sheffield)
Dan Isaacson (Oxford)
Nick Jardine (Cambridge)
Ward Jones (Rhodes)
Susan Mendus (York)
Adrian Moore (Oxford)
David Owens (Sheffield)
Jennifer Saul (Sheffield)
Anthony Savile (LSE)
Tom Stoneham (York)
Alan Thomas (Kent)
Edward Winters (Westminster)

Future seminars

17 October, 2006, 2pm
Andrew McGonigal (University of Leeds)
'Aesthetic Value and Moral Value'

November 15, 2006, 2pm
Alan Carter (University of Glasgow)
'Towards a multidimensional, environmentalist ethic'

For details of upcoming research events, please contact the Department of Philosophy by email: Arts-Philosophy-Enqs@open.ac.uk.

Other external speakers, including many international visitors, have given talks to a more formal research group on Mind, Meaning and Rationality. Details can be found on the group's webpages.

In addition to research talks, external philosophers give lectures to Open University students and tutors as part of our residential schools, in particular AXR271: Doing Philosophy. Guest Lecturers in recent years have included:

Alexander Bird (Bristol)
Michael Clark (Nottingham)
Sean Crawford (Lancaster)
Alice Drewery (Reading)
Robert Frazier (Oxford)
David Owens (Sheffield)
Michael Rosen (Oxford)
Barry Smith (Birkbeck)
Kathleen Stock (Sussex)
Jonathan Woolf (UCL)

Finally, philosophers often visit the OU at the invitation of one of the many philosophers or academics with strong philosophical interests based in other departments, including Art History, Computing, Economics, and Mathematics. For example, Baroness Onora O’Neill (Cambridge) spoke on the nature and ethics of trust to the Computing Research Centre in July 2004.