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Philosophers at ACU are a diverse and research-engaged community.
We span a number of organisational units within the Faculty of Theology and Philosophy and the faculty of Education and Arts:
Our research and teaching expertise covers a wide range of contemporary philosophical areas, specialisations and methodologies, as indicated by the links below.
|
Philosophy of language |
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 | |
| Philosophy of mathematics | Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | Mathematical necessity |
|
Philosophy of mind |
Dr Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | Mental content |
| Talia Morag | Philosophy of mind; philosophical psychology; psychoanalysis | |
| Dr Margot Strohminger | Imagination | |
|
Philosophy of science |
Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Explanation; confirmation; inference |
| Talia Morag | ||
|
Epistemology |
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 Juhani Yli-Vakkuri | Justification (semantic internalism/externalism); vagueness; compositionality; semantic plasticity; modality | |
|
Metaphilosophy |
Dr Nick Trakakis | The value and future of philosophy; analytic vs continental philosophy; philosophy and the university |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Philosophy as a way of life; historical conceptions of philosophy; philosophy and professionalisation; sociology of intellectuals |
|
Phenomenology and hermeneutics |
Professor Claude Romano | German and French phenomenology |
| Professor Richard Colledge | Heidegger; Gadamer; Levinas; JL Nancy; Kant; Kierkegaard | |
| Professor Robyn Horner | Marion; Lacoste; Derrida; Levinas; Lyotard | |
| Dr Nick Trakakis | Nietzsche; Kierkegaard; religious existentialism, Camus; Sartre; De Beauvoir; Cioran | |
| David Newheiser | Derrida; Agamben | |
| Associate Professor Andrew Poe | Deleuze, Rancière, Derrida | |
| Lexi Eikelboom | Merleau-Ponty; Agamben | |
| Kishore Saval | German and French phenomenology | |
|
Philosophy of psychoanalysis |
Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Freud; Lacan; Klein; Zizek |
| Talia Morag | Freud | |
| Professor Richard Colledge | Freud; Rank; existential psychotherapies | |
|
Critical theory |
Dr James Dorahy | The Frankfurt School (1st, 2nd, 3rd generations); The Budapest School; Marxism and post-Marxist political philosophy; Zygmunt Bauman; Charles Taylor |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Max Horkheimer; Herbert Marcuse; Franz Neumann; Gyorgy Lukacs; Ernst Bloch | |
| Associate Professor Andrew Poe | Benjamin, Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Honneth | |
| Kishore Saval | From Hegel to Derrida | |
|
Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy |
Dr Tyler Paytas | Plato; Epictetus |
| Professor Claude Romano | Greek philosophy | |
| David Newheiser | Dionysius the Areopagite | |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Plato; Aristotle, Stoicism; ancient philosophical institutions and practices; classical receptions | |
Medieval and renaissance philosophy |
Benjamin DeSpain | Aquinas; Thomism |
| Professor Claude Romano | Renaissance philosophy | |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Francis Bacon, Michel de Montaigne, experimental philosophy (Locke), Neostoicism, the enlightenment philosophies | |
|
Early modern philosophy |
Milicent Churcher | Adam Smith; moral sentiments |
| Professor Claude Romano | Philosophical romanticism | |
| Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Early modern metaphysics and epistemology | |
| 20th Century philosophy | Professor Claude Romano | Phenomenology and the Analytic tradition (from early Wittgenstein onward) |
Continental philosophy of religion |
Professor Claude Romano | Augustine |
| Professor Robyn Horner | Marion; Derrida; Theological methodology; gift; revelation | |
| David Newheiser | Derrida; atheism; hope | |
| Associate Professor Andrew Poe | Debates in Postmodern Theology, Derrida, Nancy, Enthusiasm | |
| Professor Richard Colledge | Medieval apophatic theology; models of Divinity; panentheism | |
Analytic philosophy of religion |
Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Skeptical theism; Bayesian arguments from evil; Molinism; God and possible worlds |
| Dr Nick Trakakis | Epistemology of religious beliefs; metaphysics of idealism | |
Problem of evil |
Dr Nick Trakakis | Theodicy and anti-theodicy; evidential argument from evil |
| Professor Richard Colledge | Theodicy; Divine absence | |
| Religious language | Professor Richard Colledge | Aquinas; Wittgenstein; Ian Ramsay |
Political theology |
David Newheiser | Negative political theology; secularisation of hope |
| Dr Alda Balthrop Lewis | Relation of religion and politics to theological histories of gender, race, nature and nation |
|
Applied ethics |
Associate Professor David Kirchhoffer | Healthcare ethics |
| Associate Professor Bridget Pratt | Global health ethics, healthcare ethics, research ethics (focus on equity and social justice); environmental justice, and/or ecological justice | |
| Dr Marija Kirjanenko | Bioethics | |
| Dr Steve Matthews | Healthcare ethics | |
| Associate Professor Xavier Symons | Healthcare ethics, philosophy of wellbeing | |
| Associate Professor Bernadette Tobin | Healthcare ethics | |
| Dr Alda Balthrop Lewis | Environmental ethics | |
|
Meta ethics |
Dr Caleb Perl | Semantics and pragmatics of moral discourse; moral error theory; moral naturalism |
| Talia Morag | Practical and theoretical reason | |
| Professor Clayton Littlejohn | Practical and theoretical reason | |
| Moral psychology | Associate Professor Steve Matthews | Addiction; agency; responsibility; social self |
|
Normative ethics |
Dr Caleb Perl | Consequentialism |
| Dr Stewart Braun | Virtue theory | |
| Millicent Churcher | Sentimentalism in Smith and Hume | |
| Adam Lovett | Social ethics and ethics of democracy | |
| Dr Tyler Paytas | Plato; Stoicism; Kant; Sidgwick; Aristotle | |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Philosophy as a way of life, stoic ethics, history of Western ethical philosophies | |
| Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Axiology; Infinite value | |
| Professor Clayton Littlejohn | Deontology and uncertainty; intuitionism | |
| Philosophy of art aesthetics | Dr James Dorahy | Deleuze, Rancière, philosophy of cinema |
|
Social and political philosophy |
Dr Stewart Braun | Distributive and productive justice |
| Milicent Churcher | Philosophy of institutions, epistemic justice | |
| Adam Lovett | Democratic theory | |
| Dr James Dorahy | Marxism and post-Marxism | |
| Talia Morag | ||
| Dr Caleb Perl | Political liberalism | |
| Associate Professor Andrew Poe | Democratic theory; resistance; political violence | |
| Associate Professor Matt Sharpe | Camus; psychoanalytic political theory; Leo Strauss; far right/fascism/neofascism; politics of intellectuals | |
| Dr Nevin Climenhaga | Political epistemology; legal epistemology | |
|
Other areas of expertise |
Millicent Churcher | Affect; embodiment; power; institutions; gender; sex |
| Dr Stewart Braun | Philosophy of law | |
| Dr Alda Balthrop Lewis | Environmental philosophy; Thoreau and environmental ethics | |
| Dr Nick Trakakis | Philosophy as literature; literature as philosophy, Dostoevsky; Kafka; poetry and philosophy | |
| Professor Claude Romano | William Faulkner | |
| Kishore Saval | Shakespeare |
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