Throughout all our research to date, we have subjected our own and others’ ideas to rigorous philosophical critique and analysis. The foundations of our scientific work have been grounded in our own analytical philosophical work in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of mind and action, philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, aesthetics and the philosophy of science, as well as conducting more specialist philosophical analysis in the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and post-Wittgensteinian work, the philosophy of cybernetics, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of psychology, the philosophy of psychoanalysis and the philosophy of psychiatry (see also our description of CHAPS, our Centre for the History and Philosophy of Science).

Along the way, we have ended up radically reconceiving the place of mind in nature, together with a new understanding of the relationship between language and the world. Constructing an alternative semantics and making a number of innovations in philosophical logic, our philosophical work attempts to turn on their head a gamut of 17th- and 18th-Century metaphysical presuppositions that remain largely unquestioned in contemporary philosophy (except, notably, by some philosophers more-or-less hostile to this kind of systematic metaphysical enterprise in the first place).

The Centre’s current, active philosophical research interests include —

• The defence of the fundamental notion of purpose in metaphysics
• The defence of the reality of free will
• The refutation of physicalism in the philosophy of mind
• The refutation of all forms of relativism and the defence of universal, objective truth
• Meaning, truth and knowledge in Plato’s Cratylus and Theaetetus
• The New Realism
• The critique of the semantic concept of “referents”
• The philosophy of the person
• The solution of the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness
• The revival of Oxford ordinary language philosophy
• The philosophy of Gilbert Ryle
• The philosophy of Cassirer
• Oakeshott and the refutation of rationalism
• The refutation of determinism and reductionism in science
• The defence of scientific holism

Research
Centres