Dr Andrei Bespalov has joined the Department as a WIRL COFUND Fellow with the Institute of Advanced Study. Andrei has a PhD in Political Science from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, 2019) and also holds a Candidate of Philosophical Sciences degree in social philosophy from Lomonosov Moscow State University (2004), where he taught between 2004 and 2015. Andrei’s current research interests centre on political philosophy and theories of public reason. His Fellowship while with the Department will focus on Sceptical Liberalism: Maintaining Public Reason in the Age of Disagreement. His research will aim to redefine public reason in fallibilistic terms, leading to a liberal conception of political society that is more agonistic and yet more accommodating to pluralism about justice than the standard Rawlsian view.

Dr Walter Dean has been awarded an 18-month long Fellowship for Experienced Researchers by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The Fellowship will fund Walter's continuing research on the role of arithmetical methods in Hilbert's program and related developments in computability theory and reverse mathematics. Among the topics he will explore are whether arithmetisation provides a uniform assimilation of the paradoxes of set theory and semantics to incompleteness phenomena and the legacy of the slogan 'consistency implies existence' (which is often associated with Hilbert) in contemporary model theory. Walter will be based at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy for the duration of the Fellowship.

Firat Akova, who is studying for a PhD in Philosophy, has been awarded a place on the prestigious Early Career Conference Programme (ECCP) at the Global Priorities Institute (GPI) at the University of Oxford (8 June - 3 July 2020). On this programme, each participant is required to select and focus on a particular research project of fundamental importance to the question of how to do good effectively. The culmination of the ECCP is a conference, at which Programme participants present their project and its findings. The Global Priorities Institute is an interdisciplinary research centre, and conducts foundational research into doing good, using multiple disciplines - especially philosophy and economics - to achieve an effectiveness-based approach to global prioritisation.