On January 12th Keith Ansell-Pearson took part in a BBC Radio 4 ‘In Our Time’ programme devoted to Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. The host was Melvyn Bragg and the other guests were Fiona Hughes (Essex) and Stephen Mulhall (Oxford). You can listen to the programme here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b087rt4z

Special issue of Changing English on the Uses of Poetry, guest edited by Karen Simecek (Warwick) and Kate Rumbold (Birmingham) now available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ccen20/current. This special issue brings together researchers in Philosophy, Psychology, Education Studies and English Literature to reflect on the value of poetry and the role it should play in education.

The Philosophy department is delighted to welcome the following new staff to its growing community:

Dr John Micheal

John joined the department on the 1st July 2016 as Assistant Professor and was previously Marie Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Hungary. John works mainly on issues pertaining to social cognition -- especially mindreading, perspective taking, joint action, and the sense of commitment -- but is also interested in lots of issues in cognitive science and in the philosophy of cognitive science. For more information please see: https://warwick.academia.edu/JohnMichael. John will be leading a 5 year starting grant from the European Research Council to investigate the sense of commitment in joint action (ERC StG 679092: The Sense of Commitment). For more information please see the recent press release  

Mrs Jayne Parker

Jayne joins the department as Project Administrator for the Sense of Commitment project and will work two days a week to support John Michael and his research team over the next five years. Jayne previously worked in the Warwick Medical School in a very similar role supporting the Mental Health Project ‘MILESTONE’.

 Dr Tom McClelland

Tom joined the department on the 1st September 2016 as a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow and will be with us for the next 3 years in this role. Tom works mainly in the area of Cognitive Phenomenology. He was previously a post-doc on the Architecture of Consciousness project at the University of Manchester, and a fixed-term lecturer at the University of Glasgow.

Dr John Tillson

John joined the department on the 1st September 2016 for 2 years as a Teaching Fellow with academic responsibility within the department for admissions, outreach and recruitment activities. John comes to us from Dublin City University and will develop and lead the Department’s recruitment, admissions and outreach strategies. John will also contribute to the first year tutorial teaching this year. John’s research interests include: The ethics and nature of formative influence; Religious Education; Moral Education; Philosophy of Education; Ethical Theory; Philosophy of Religion.

The 2016 NSS Survey results have been released, confirming an overall 89% level for student satisfaction for students in the Department of Philosophy.

Notably, 90% of students in the department were satisfied with the teaching on their course. This included 95% of students in the department agreeing that their course was intellectually stimulating and 93% that staff were good at explaining things.

The Philosophy and Literature course in particular has this year received some very high ratings, with 98% of respondents on this course stating they were satisfied with the teaching, and 91% for academic support. The Philosophy and Literature course also received 100% agreement from respondents for a number of questions: ‘Staff have made the subject interesting’, ‘Staff are enthusiastic about what they are teaching’, ‘The course is intellectually stimulating’, ‘I have been able to contact staff when I needed to’.

It is good news to receive these strong overall levels of satisfaction from students in the department, and looking ahead, we hope to continue to work together with students and staff on this in the coming academic year.

From January 2017, Warwick will be hosting a new interdisciplinary research project Time: Between Metaphysics and Psychology, funded by an award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The aim of the project is to bring debates about the metaphysics of time, which often invoke claims about our experience of time, into contact with actual research in psychology on the origins and nature of our everyday understanding of time. The three-year project, which will be lead by Christoph Hoerl (Philosophy, Warwick) and Teresa McCormack (Psychology, Belfast), will involve two 2-year postdocs (one in philosophy, one in psychology), a series of workshops and public engagement activities, as well as collaborations with a range of performing arts groups.