Organisation profile

All of our Philosophy Staff carry out research. UH Philosophy achieved excellent results in the last Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014), with 19% of our research being judged 4* ('world-leading') and a further 47% of it judged 3* ('internationally excellent'). All staff in Philosophy were submitted for this exercise.

Our research strengths include Philosophy of Mind & Action, Metaphysics (esp. Philosophy of Time), Philosophy of Mathematics, Philosophy of Perception, Aesthetics (esp. Philosophy of Literature), Moral Philosophy (inc. Moral Psychology), Philosophy of Religion, Philosophy of Education, Cultural Heritage Ethics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophical Methodology, Kierkegaard, Hume, Lakatos, and Wittgenstein.

We offer Masters by Research and PhD degrees on a broad range of areas of supervision topics in any of the above fields. Recent doctoral theses in Philosophy completed at UH include Zuzanna Rucinska’s Pretence: Role of Representations and Intersubjectivity? (2015), Colin Rittberg’s Methods, Goals and Metaphysics in Contemporary Set Theory (2016), Istvan Zardai’s What Are Actions? (2016), Neil O'Hara's 'Basic Moral Certainty and the Foundations of Morality' (2017) and Katja Behrens’ Click: Social Action in the 21st Century (2018).

Two of our Philosophy staff have recently been awarded Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowships: Professor John Lippitt’s for his project Love’s Forgiveness (2018-2020) and Dr Sam Coleman on Consciousness as Bystander: Exploring the Mostly Unconscious Mind (2019-2021).  Dr Craig Bourne has been awarded a 6-month Research Fellowship by the Mind Association, for a project on truth in fiction (2019-2020).

Our Research is also having impact beyond the academy. Professor John Lippitt is advising Hertfordshire Constabulary on implementing the national police Code of Ethics (CoE) and Professor Constantine Sandis has been consulting Microsoft Research on AI Intelligibility.

We hold a fortnightly Research Seminar with visiting speakers and have organised major international conferences. Most recently we hosted the European Society for Philosophy & Psychology (ESPP 2017) Conference and in 2021 will be hosting the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society & Mind Association. The University of Hertfordshire is also home to the British Wittgenstein Society, Why Philosophy Matters, and the UH Forum for Virtue & Understanding. In 2019 our annual Francis Bacon Lecture for the general public was given by Prof Hans-Johann Glock, on Animal Minds & Animal Morals.  The 2020 Francis Bacon Lecture will be given by Prof Kathleen Stock.