Philosophy
RAE 2008 - the results
See how our philosophy research scored in the Research and Assessment Exercise 2008.
Research leader:
Professor Dan Hutto
The Department of Philosophy at Hertfordshire provides an intellectually stimulating environment for research. Its researchers have diverse interests and are not limited to a single philosophical tradition, school or period of philosophy. The topics they pursue often drive them to cut across such divides, and are highly interdisciplinary.
Philosophers at Hertfordshire have an international profile and presence. They publish with leading presses (such as Blackwell, CUP, MIT, Routledge, OUP) and in top-ranking journals (e.g. Analysis, Erkenntnis, Mind and Language, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Synthese). They are regularly invited as keynote or plenary speakers at important conferences. They win competitive funding from major research organizations (AHRC, ESF, Mind Association, RIP); are awarded prizes and honours by prestigious organizations (APA, UNESCO); serve on the executive committees of significant academic associations (BPA), learned societies (BWS), and research funding bodies (AHRC, ESF).
In the 2008 national Research Assessment exercise (RAE), 90% of the research profiled in the Department was rated as ‘internationally recognised' or 'internationally excellent' in terms of originality, significance and rigour. This was a significant improvement on RAE 2001, This is line with general upward trend within the University of Hertfordshire, which rose up the rankings in the Times Higher Education Table of Excellence, moving from 93rd place in 2001 up to 58th in 2008.
The research interests of individual staff members are diverse and wide ranging, but the department has four distinctive areas of concentration and strength.
- Philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science, especially, on topics relating to information; representation; perception; consciousness; intersubjectivity; folk psychology and enactive, embodied, extended approaches to the mind. Research on these topics is both philosophically and empirically informed and focused.
- Ethics, broadly construed, including the relation between narrative, literature and ethics; information and computer ethics; Kantian ethics; philosophical and religious aspects of love and friendship; the moral status of animals and the environment; moral agency.
- Metaphysics, with strengths in time, perception, consciousness, idealism and structural realism.
- Metaphilosophy and Philosophical Method, particularly in relation to the philosophy of Kierkegaard, Sellars and Wittgenstein.
