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What is the nature of reality, and how do we come to know it? Metaphysics and epistemology ask the biggest questions underlying our sense of the world and the development of the sciences.
Metaphysics is concerned with the fundamental nature of reality: existence, essence and identity, time, space, freedom, causation and God.
Epistemology asks how it is that human beings come to know reality, what kinds of knowledge there are, and what are the limits and obstacles to human knowledge.
Both ancient philosophical areas are fundamental and fascinating in their own right but are also of foundational relevance for the progress of other fields such as the natural sciences, theology and psychology.
First year
PHIL100 Philosophy: The Big Questions
Second year
PHIL204 Knowledge, Rationality and Scepticism
PHIL205 Mind, Body and Consciousness
PHIL206 Problems in Metaphysics
PHIL210 Language, Meaning and Truth
PHIL219 Basic Symbolic Logic
Third year
PHIL322 Metaphysics and Epistemology Seminar
PHIL622 Truth and Interpretation (Hermeneutics)
| Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | |
| Dr Nick Trakakis | Theories of meaning and translation; philosophy and translation |
| Dr Caleb Perl | Indicative conditionals; attitude verbs; not-at-issue commitments; moral semantics |
| Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | Mathematical necessity |
| Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | Mental content |
| Talia Morag | Philosophy of mind; philosophical psychology; psychoanalysis |
| Dr Margot Strohminger | Imagination |
| Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Explanation; confirmation; inference |
| Talia Morag |
| Dr Nick Trakakis | Epistemology of religious beliefs; metaphysical idealism |
| Dr Caleb Perl | Contextualism about epistemic modals; propositional temporalism and contingentism |
| Dr Margot Strohminger | Imagination; thought experiments; counterfactual thinking; truth in fiction; epistemology |
| Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Belief; infallibilism; inductive inferences; causal inferences; epistemic probability; Bayesian reasoning |
| Professor Clayton Littlejohn | Rational belief; internalism-externalism debate; disagreement; legal epistemology; knowledge-first epistemology |
| Dr Nick Trakakis | The value and future of philosophy; analytic vs continental philosophy; philosophy and the university; intuitions in philosophy |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Philosophy as a way of life; historical conceptions of philosophy; philosophy and professionalisation; sociology of intellectuals |
| Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | Justification (semantic internalism/externalism); vagueness; compositionality; semantic plasticity; modality |
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