Students

Current Postgraduate Students
Anya Daly Anya is currently in limbo between submission of her thesis and the oral defence, anticipated for September or October 2012. She has been enrolled in a cotutelle between the University of Melbourne and the Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, under the joint supervision of Professor Renaud Barbaras, Dr. François Schroeter and Dr. Maurita Harney. Anya’s thesis is titled "The problem of the Other in the work of Merleau-Ponty: from Epistemology to Ethics" and examines not only the phenomenological perspective, but also contributions from neuroscience and Buddhist philosophy. Her interests include: ontology, epistemology, ethics, neuroscience, the nexus between philosophy and literature, ethics in the business domain, buddhist philosophy, aesthetics and the relevance of philosophy to public issues.
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.
Bernd Bartl is a Ph.D. candidate working on philosophy of science. He is supervised by Howard Sankey.
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.
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.
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 a Master of Arts in Philosophy from Monash, as well as a Postgraduate Certificate in Professional Ethics from Melbourne.
Cristian Soto is a lecturer in philosophy at the Philosophy Department of the University of Chile and is currently working in his doctoral research in Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Dana Goswick and Howard Sankey. He is elaborating an abductive scientific realism as a metaphysics of science for laws of nature. His research areas in the contemporary debate on the new metaphysics of science are laws of nature, scientific realism, ontic structural realism, scientific essentialism and constructive empiricism. Other previous research areas: early modern philosophy, classical North American pragmatism, especially Peirce's realist philosophy of science and scholastic-realist metaphysics, and Jack Smart's ethics, philosophy of science and metaphysics.
Desmonda Kearney completed a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame in Fremantle, Western Australia. Following 2 years lecturing there in philosophy and ethics, she moved to Melbourne where she is currently 2 years into a PhD in Philosophy. Desmonda's thesis is on the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy, taking a critical look at the categories that philosophical aesthetics has adopted for illuminating what poetry is for us.
Holger Heine is a Ph.D. student working on logic. He is supervised by Graham Priest.
Judy Chambers is a part-time Master of Arts student. She has a BA from the University of Toronto and completed her honours in Philosophy at Sydney University. She has a Master of Bioethics from Monash University. Currently Judy is working on moral motivation in the works of Joseph Butler. Her main areas of interest are ethics and bioethics. Her supervisor is Dr Karen Jones.
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.
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.
Marilyn Stendera is a PhD candidate researching models of practical engagement and purposive action found within the phenomenological tradition. Focussing upon Heidegger's account of the distinction between practical and theoretical modes of experience, her thesis seeks to investigate phenomenological claims about the primacy of the practical attitude and their role in contemporary discourses about mind, language and experience. Marilyn's supervisor is Dr. Andrew Inkpin. Her other philosophical interests include: hermeneutics and critical theory; the Continental/analytic distinction; and issues in the philosophy of mind, including the structure of perceptual content and the nature of concepts (especially as explored by McDowell and Brandom).
Nik Parkin has been living and studying in Melbourne since he started his 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 taught a course called 'Violence, War and Terrorism', which sounds morbid, but is actually pretty fun.
Pamela Clelland Gray is undertaking doctoral studies in philosophy. Her research area is aesthetic education in public art galleries. Chris Cordner is her Supervisor.
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.
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.
Salman Panahi was born in Tehran (Iran) in 1979 and studied Mechanical engineering (Bachelor of Science) in Mzandaran University and Philosophical Logic (Master of Art) in Tarbiat Modares University. He is now doing research on the nature of the logical inference with the emphasis on the Logical Constants. He is also interested in ethics, metaphysic, epistemology and philosophy of language.
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.


Past Postgraduate Students
Aaron Guthrie completed his Masters at the University of Melbourne, and is now pursuing a PhD at Bristol. His thesis took some technical work from the Verisimilitude (or Truthlikeness) literature, and applied it to other philosophical issues, such as meaning similarity, counterfactuals, and structured propositions. Another aspect of the thesis was the 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.
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:
Lyndal Grant did a Master of Arts (research), writing on the role that concepts play in perceptual experience. Of particular interest was the question of whether non-doxastic perceptual experiences can be reasons for belief. Her broader interests included 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.
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.
Simon D'Alfonso completed a PhD titled 'Towards a Framework for Semantic Information' at The University of Melbourne. His areas of specialisation are logic, epistemology and the philosophy of information and computation. More information can be found at:
Tama Coutts finished his masters 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.