| Current Postgraduate Students | |
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| Bernd Bartl is a Ph.D. candidate working on philosophy of science. He is supervised by Howard Sankey. | |
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Ricki Bliss is a PhD candidate. She works in metaphysics and Buddhist philosophy. The working title of her dissertation is ‘Against Foundationalism’. In this dissertation, contra the prevailing metaphysical picture expounded in contemporary analytic metaphysics, she sets out the structural features of alternate metaphysical pictures, and attempts to elucidate their possibility. She is supervised by Professor Graham Priest. |
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Gilles Bouche is audent wor Ph.D. stking on logic. He is supervised by Greg Restall. |
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Lyndal Grant is currently a Master of Arts (research) candidate, writing on the role that concepts play in perceptual experience. Of particular interest is the question of whether non-doxastic perceptual experiences can be reasons for belief. Her broader interests include examining the central role that perceptual experience plays in virtue ethics, the question of whether desire can be understood as a type of perception ("that x would be good"), and theories of personal identity which take the self to be merely a locus of experiences. She finds Buddhist theories of no-self particularly relevant to this last question. |
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Aaron Guthrie is currently enrolled in a Masters. His thesis takes some technical work from the Verisimilitude (or Truthlikeness) literature, and applies it to other philosophical issues, such as meaning similarity, counterfactuals, and structured propositions. Another aspect of the thesis is expanding our understanding of the translations proposed in the Verisimilitude literature. His main philosophical interests are in the areas of Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Logic, and Philosophy of Science. |
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Holger Heine is a Ph.D. student working on logic. He is supervised by Graham Priest. |
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Desmonda Kearney is an Master of Arts student working on ethics. Her research is on the ‘ancient quarrel’ between poetry and philosophy, and what precisely is contested between them. The question of their relationship is not simply one of philosophical attitudes towards the arts, though its antipathy to them has a distinguished tradition. At issue is the epistemological status of poetry and the limitations of argumentative discourse – the quarrel between poetry and philosophy is over ways of knowing. Kearneys’ research looks at the provenance of the quarrel by examining Plato’s complaints against poetry in The Republic, and at its contemporary permutations by pressing the question of poetry’ relationship to knowledge. That Plato defined the task of philosophy specifically in opposition to poetry was and is centrtal to philosophy’s self image, and my research examines the continuation of the quarrel in contemporary philosophy. She is supervised by Chris Cordner. |
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Ross Barham is a part-time PhD candidate, writing about the role that language plays in our coming to have the concept of objectivity. The later philosophy of Donald Davidson is particularly relevant to this area of research. He has a Master of Arts on the topic of philosophical conceptions of saintliness, and is the Head of the Philosophy faculty at Melbourne High School. |
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Simon D’Alfonso is currently pursuing a PhD at The University of Melbourne. Working within the field of Philosophy of Information, he is looking at definitions of information and how the concept of information can be applied to traditional philosophical issues in semantics and epistemology. He majored in Philosophy as part of the Arts component of his Bachelor of Arts & Sciences degree (majored also in Computer Science). More generally, areas of philosophy that he is interested in include Logic, Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of Science. Lastly, his favourite philosopher is Bertrand Russell. More information can be found at: |
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Bogdan Dicher arrived at the University of Melbourne in February 2010. He is working on a thesis on ‘Logical Pluralism and the Meaning of the Logical Constants’ under the supervision of Greg Restall. His main interests are in the philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language. He is sympathetic towards intuitionism and inferentialism. When the moon is full he feels an irresistible drive to think about legal objectivity and other issues in philosophical jurisprudence. Bogdan’s role model is Cato Minor and he lives up to Cato’s example between 4 and 5 AM, most days of the week. |
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Clare McCausland is writing a PhD thesis in animal ethics, looking at animal welfare, animal rights and utilitarianism. Her other interests are in metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, languages and linguistics. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in German Studies (Linguistics) and Philosophy and an Master of Arts in Philosophy from Monash, as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Ethics from Melbourne. |
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Nik Parkin has been living and studying in Melbourne since I started my PhD in early 2009. Nik is part of the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, and his area of research is the ethics of war. He can be described as a ‘contingent pacifist.’ Overall Nik finds applied ethics to be a very enjoyable and challenging field to work in. He has a masters in Indian metaphysics, so he enjoys that too.He like playing the guitar, and rock climbing, and is teaching a course called ‘Violence, War and Terrorism,’ which sounds morbid, but is actually pretty fun. |
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Belinda Prakhoff is researching issues in philosophy of music for her PhD thesis, with an emphasis on understanding music, musical structure and the emotions. Her other interests are philosophy of art, aesthetics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science. She is also a professional opera singer. She has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Music (Hons) in Voice, both from the University of Adelaide, and a Master of Music Performance from the Victorian College of the Arts. |
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Julian Spiller commenced his Master of Arts by Advanced Seminar & Shorter Thesis in the first semester of 2009, after completing his Honours at the University of Melbourne. His philosophical interests lie in the fields of Practical Rationality, Virtue Ethics and the Philosophy of Love. His research project concerns the evolution of Bernard Williams’ reasons internalism between collections, although he is currently preparing a exploratory piece on the deliberative role of optimism and pessimism. |
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Jason White did a PhD in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne (submitted 2010), conducting research into contemporary philosophy of language. He examined the comparative merits of different approaches to the construction of theories of meaning, focusing on the question, originally raised by Michael Dummett, of whether a semantic theory should strive to offer a non-trivial account of the primitive expressions of a language. In addressing this issue, Jason concentrated in particular on recent advances in inferentialist semantics, as developed by Robert Brandom at the University of Pittsburgh. For more information please visit: |
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Pamela Clelland Gray is undertaking doctoral studies in philosophy. Her research area is aesthetic education in public art galleries. Chris Cordner is her Supervisor. |
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Sam Gates-Scovelle B.A (Hons), M.A. is specially interested in programmatic change to the self. His current research is in personal identity. He is developing a theory of self-transformation; a positive, permissive theory which allows that it is possible to change into a radically different person in a normally-lived, normally-short life. At times, he has been a pyrrhonist and a neoexistentialist, but nowadays Sam answers to ‘writer-philosopher’. Sam believes that philosophy is a discipline that needs to be exercised outside academe as well as inside. For seven years he taught a highly successful philosophy program at the Centre for Adult Education on topics from capitalism, software piracy, stem cell technology, creation science and The Buddha to The Matrix, Google, blogging, oh, and the meaning of life. He also has three chapters in Open Court’s Dune and Philosophy [forthcoming April 2011]. In his spare time, Sam enjoys haiku and cycling. |
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Tim Grace is a PhD candidate writing on the topic of personal autonomy. Tim’s research involves developing a substantive theory of personal autonomy and bringing this to bear on current debates in health-care ethics, philosophy of education and political philosophy. He also finds most things interesting in the fields of ethics, metaethics and Asian philosophy. Tim is supervised by Karen Jones. |
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Kerstin Knight is currently a Ph.D student in CAPPE. The title of her thesis is “Paraconsistent Ethics of Advance Care Planning”, which looks at the philosophical framework of the idea of advance care planning. Her Supervisors are Dr. Neil Levy, Dr.Lynn Gillam, Dr. Merle Spriggs She sometimes still works as a medical doctor in the area of emergency medicine and intensive care. Other philosophical interests are metaphysics,philosophy of art/literature/music,and the intriguingly fascinating, frustrating nature of paradoxes. |
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Phillip Johnston is a part-time Master of Arts (research) student working on free will, epiphenomenalism and related critiques of moral responsibility in Nietzsche. Phillip is fascinated by the philosophical (and cultural) relationship between responsibility, punishment and free will, particularly in light of the empirical psychological case for epiphenomenalism presented by Wegner. Phillip is supervised by Francois Schroeter. |
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Che-Ping Su is a fulltime Master of Arts student from Taiwan. Che-Ping does research in logic with Professor Graham Priest and Dr. Zach Weber. |
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| Past Postgraduate Students | |
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Tama Coutts finished his master’s degree in 2009, under Laura Schroeter. Prior to his retirement Tama was supervised by Barry Taylor. Tama’s thesis was on Davidsonian semantics and attendant fallout, mostly metaphysical. The thesis focused on the semantics of mass expressions. Tama is beginning a doctorate in 2010 at the University of Sydney under Huw Price. He works on the philosophy of language and related areas. His work is more helpfully characterised by reference to people rather than topics: Davidson, Dummett, Tenant, Austin, Wittgenstein, Blackburn, Price, Wiggins, McDowell, Wright, MacIntyre, Cavell and Bernard Williams. |
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