Research projects in the Department

Method in Philosophical Aesthetics

Project: Method in Philosophical Aesthetics: the challenge from the sciences
Funding: A major collaborative project funded by the AHRC
Project leaders: Greg Currie (Nottingham), Matthew Kieran (Leeds) and Aaron Meskin (Leeds)
Project website:  www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/aesthetics/index.html

Artworks, craft products, and landscapes are said to produce aesthetic pleasures when we encounter them. Some of them are said to give us insights into deep issues of meaning, value, personality and character. But on what basis can we say that a painting or a play gives us psychological insight? Against what standard are such claims to be tested? How can I know that my judgement of a work really is a response to its aesthetic features?

Aesthetics in the Anglo-American tradition has generally assumed that the relevant standards are those set by the intuitions of reflective, self-conscious agents who thoroughly grasp the relevant concepts. It is not much of a simplification to say that philosophers ask themselves "How does it seem to me that I respond to art works and other aesthetic objects?"; their answers provide the data for a philosophical theory of art and the aesthetic.

Causation in Science

Project: Causation in Science: An interdisciplinary Study of Causal Processes
Funding: An interdisciplinary collaborative project funded by the Norwegian Research Council (NFR)
Project leaders: Rani Anjum (Norwegian University of Life Science - UMB), with Stephen Mumford (Nottingham) as a project director
Project website: http://www.umb.no/causci/

Causation is central to our understanding of how matter, life, minds and society works. The project seeks a better understanding of causal processes in nature, improving our theoretical understanding of causation in general while also solving problems in the sciences in light of the theory. The project will look at how causation is understood in physics, biology, psychology and the social sciences and what problems the notion of causation raises for those sciences. Under the overall direction of Project Manager Rani Lill Anjum will be a group that includes Professors Stephen Mumford (Nottingham) and John Dupré (Exeter), two of the world's most respected and innovative thinkers in their fields, and a host of other Norwegian, European and North American philosophers of science and scientists. A large national and international network of senior and junior academics is already established from a wide range of research fields and institutions.

Institutional partners are SVT – Centre for the Study of the Sciences and the Humanities (Bergen), represented by Professor Roger Strand, and School of Humanities, University of Nottingham, represented by Professor Stephen Mumford. The budget is 9,244.000 Norwegian kroner over 4 years, fully financed by NFR’s FRIHUM funding scheme.

Metaphysics of Science

Project: Metaphysics of Science: causes, laws, kinds, and dispositions
Funding: A major collaborative project funded by the AHRC
Project leaders: Alexander Bird (Bristol), Helen Beebee ( Birmingham), Stephen Mumford (Nottingham)
Project website: www.bris.ac.uk/metaphysicsofscience

We naturally think that what happens in the universe is governed by laws of nature. We also think that events are causally related to other events, that things are naturally classified into kinds (physical, chemical and biological kinds, for example), and that at least some natural kinds have distinctive dispositions (for example, the disposition of NaCl to dissolve in water). This project explores how, or whether, all these distinct notions – law, cause, natural kind, disposition – can be made to fit together into a coherent and unified worldview. For example, must two causally related events be such that they are members of kinds that are lawfully related? Must those kinds be natural kinds? Are natural kinds distinguished from one another by the fact that members of different kinds are disposed to behave in different ways?

Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2007-10

Project: Norwegian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship
Project leader: Rani Lill Anjum

The primary object of the project is to develop an alternative account of causal relations in light of a new understanding of conditionals and conditionality. A comprehensive study of causal relations will be based on an analysis of fundamental philosophical concepts such as hypotheticality, potentiality and necessity. Extensional logics are unable to deal with hypotheticality, as conditionals are typically reduced to functions of their antecedent and consequent. What we need is a plausible account of potentiality that guarantees the hypotheticality expressed by 'if'. The project aims at investigating the relation between dispositions and conditionals in order to give a plausible account of causation.