Aesthetic Values and the Social Dimensions of Science, is a DFG-funded Project (running from 2025 – 2028), led by PI, Dr Alice Murphy
Philosophers now widely agree that if we are to understand science, we need to understand its social dimensions. This has given rise to hugely productive studies into the legitimacy of the influence of social values on research, the collective production of scientific knowledge, and the communication of results and methodologies to other scientists and to the public. Discussions on the role of aesthetic values in science have had a resurgence in recent years. Moving beyond the traditional focus of beauty in physics, various aesthetic properties and judgements have been shown to be embedded within many scientific practices, impacting their epistemic goals. Yet these topics have been explored almost entirely independently from the collective aspects of scientific inquiry and knowledge production.
The aim of this project is to develop a novel perspective on aesthetics in science, one which better reflects scientific practice, by centring its social dimensions. In doing so, the project also targets an underlying source of scepticism: the aesthetic is not an anti-social, wholly personal, or subjective sphere; it is intimately connected with the judgements and choices of a scientific community.
Link to project – DFG – GEPRIS – Aesthetic Values and the Social Dimensions of Science
What if…? Knowing by Imagining (WIKI), is a Leverhulme Trust grant for the project with funding of £499k. This grant funds a 3 year research project from January 2025 to December 2028, led by PI Franz Berto.
Instruments of Unity: the Many Ways of Being One is an EPSRC Research Grant, from the Frontier Research Guarantee with funding of £1.4M. The grant funds a five-year research project from January 2024 through January 2029, employing three postdocs and including a 3.5 year PhD studentship, led by PI Aaron J. Cotnoir
The Moral Responsibility of Groups
Jessica Brown has been awarded a two-year major research fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust (2021-23).
Swiss National Science Foundation Grant for Reshaping the World: A Systematic Unified Framework for Conceptual Engineering, with Manuel Gustavo Isaac
Hosted by the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews for £95,826. Dec 2019 – July 2021.
2018: Royal Society of Edinburgh Arts and Humanities Workshop Award (£9900), “Blame and Responsibility”.
For workshops at St Andrews, Glasgow and Edinburgh; network members: Brown, Carter, Kelp, Mason, McGlynn, Pettigrove, Simon, Todd.
For details, please see https://blameandresponsibility.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk/
2017/2021 European Research Council grant for project ‘The Logic of Conceivability’ (Berto), 2 million Euros.
The Logic of Conceivability (LoC) is a five-year project (2017-2021) funded by the European Research Council. It is co-hosted by St Andrews and by the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam.
“What Kind of Mind? Engaging Children and the Public with Research on Animal and Infant Minds from Philosophy and Psychology (Ball)” £53,200
AHRC funded project
2017-20 Scottish Graduate School in the Arts and Humanities Award (Hawley) £28,000
Funding for a Ph.D. student worth £28,000 (plus match funding from the University).
2017/18 Leverhulme Research Fellowship for project ‘Wholes: more than just the sum of their parts’ (Cotnoir) £45,067
The fellowship will support the research for a book that argues that whole objects are unified yet genuinely new — distinct from mere sums of their parts. The book will put forward an original metaphysics of the structure of ordinary objects.
Mind Association Senior Research Fellowship for project, Blame: Epistemic and Moral (Brown) £50,000
The project focuses on the way in which we can be blamed for failing to follow epistemic standards or norms governing belief or action.
2017/21 Leverhulme Project Grant for a project on ‘Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts’ (Read) £155,655
The aim is to produce critical editions from the medieval manuscripts of the texts on Insolubles by Paul of Venice, Walter Segrave, John Dumbleton and Peter of Ailly, with English translations of the first three and commentary.
What’s so special about first-person thought’ (Project lead Stephan Torre (Aberdeen)
The Network is comprised of researchers from University of Aberdeen, ConceptLab, Institut Jean Nicod, Logos, University of Oxford, University of St. Andrews, and Tufts University seeking to understand the nature of first-person thought.There is a deep disagreement over the philosophical significance of first-person thought. Many philosophers take it to be well-established that thoughts about the self fundamentally differ in nature from thoughts about other individuals and raise deep philosophical questions. Others maintain that their colleagues have succumbed to an attractive, yet unmotivated, myth and in fact there is nothing special or philosophically profound about first-person thoughts.
This radical difference of opinion cries out for further exploration: is there really something special about first-person thought?
The project is structured into three phases, each attempting to answer distinct questions about the nature of first-person thought: The first phase of the project will aim to clarify and demarcate what unique problems are raised by the phenomenon of first-person thought. The second phase of the project will consider the relation between the phenomenon of first-person thought and the more general phenomenon arising from so-called Frege puzzles. The third phase of the project will employ the results of the first two phases to address implications for the nature of thought and the self.
For more information, please visit the project website.
2016-17 Templeton funded grant on self-control (Hawley) £44,000
Conceptual Engineering (Cappelen, Linnebo, Serck-Hanssen) £2.5 million
Herman Cappelen, in collaboration with Oystein Linnebo and Camilla Serck-Hanssen, has received a £2.5 million, 5 year grant from the Norwegian Research Council for a project on Conceptual Engineering.In any inquiry, whether scientific or practical, we use concepts to frame questions about reality. An obvious way in which the inquiry can be successful is by yielding answers to the resulting questions. A far less obvious form of success has to do with asking the “right” questions, formulated using the “right” concepts. It is clear that many great leaps in human insight and understanding have been associated with the forging of “better” concepts, which has enabled us to ask “better” questions: in physics, the differentiation of weight and mass; in mathematics, the Cantorian notion of “size” or number; in economics, the articulation of the present concept of money; in social science the concept of gender, as opposed to sex. These are illustrations of how conceptual progress has been made in the past. Our project has three parts: one part aims to develop a general theory of conceptual engineering, another focuses on the engineering of formal concepts, and a third is concerned with social/political concepts such as ‘combatant’ and ‘privacy’. The NFR Project Conceptual Engineering is a part of the ConceptLab. For more information about ConceptLab see here.
Rethinking Mind and Meaning: A case study from a co-disciplinary approach (Ball, Cappelen, Gomez (PI), Seed, Wilson, Zuberbuhler) £200,000 awarded in total
In what sense are non-verbal creatures such as animals and human infants capable of thought? Can they reason? Are they able to use sophisticated concepts such as knowledge, causality or intentionality in their dealings with the physical and social world? If they can already do these complex things, what makes adult human thought unique? This project brings together researchers from the humanities (e.g., linguistics and philosophy) and the sciences (e.g., psychology and biology) in a co-disciplinary effort to make progress on such fundamental questions about the nature of thought, the human-animal divide, and the nature of meaning and communication.
Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2014-16) for a project on The Importance of Being Competent: Ethics and Epistemology (Hawley)
Being earnest is important, but it isn’t everything. Becoming trustworthy – as a practical agent and as a source of information – involves becoming competent, which in turn involves developing an awareness of one’s strengths and weaknesses. Central to good promise-making is the art of avoiding reckless promises, however well-intentioned. Central to treating other people with respect is the art of identifying their commitments, and fairly judging whether they are competent to meet those commitments. My project is an extended philosophical investigation of these claims, resulting in a monograph.
The Templeton Funded Experience Project (Newlands, Paul and Rea)
More information is available on the element on transformative experiences.
Guggenheim Fellowship (Paul)
Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (Thakkar)
In September 2014 Dr Mark Thakkar will take up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for three years to work on a new edition and English translation of John Wyclif’s Logic. His mentor during the Fellowship will be Professor Stephen Read. Written in the 1360s, the Logic blends philosophy with science and theology, covering topics like optics, geometry, digestion, planetary motion, atoms, time, space, and God’s foreknowledge. Its breadth should have made it a valuable source for intellectual historians, but it has hardly been studied because the nineteenth-century edition is so defective as to be frequently unintelligible. Advances in medieval scholarship, including the discovery of better manuscripts, will enable Dr Thakkar to make it more readable and widely discussed than it has been for six hundred years.