We are excited to introduce our FOUR new colleagues!
DR BEN BRAMBLE
Before joining Liverpool I spent two years at Trinity College Dublin as an Assistant Professor. I'm originally from Australia, but I've also lived and worked in philosophy departments in the US, Vienna, and Sweden. My main interests lie in moral philosophy (especially the nature and significance of well-being). I have work in progress on many topics, including animal ethics, consequentialism, future technologies, virtue and vice, and aesthetics. I also work in political philosophy and philosophy of mind. I'm a huge Beatles fan--so it's pretty exciting to now be based in Liverpool!
DR LAURA GOW
My research interests are mainly in the philosophy of mind, with a particular focus on perception and perceptual experience. Recent philosophy of mind is influenced by a commitment to physicalism – the idea that we shouldn’t need to rely on non-physical entities to explain the workings of the mind. Although I am sympathetic to this view, my published work criticises contemporary attempts to provide physicalist accounts of perception, and my recent research explores the less appealing implications of endorsing a genuinely physicalist account of mind. I am also interested in the kind of experience associated with thinking, and am currently researching the relationship between perceptual experience and thought experience. Before coming to Liverpool I lectured at the University of Warwick, and before that I held postdoctoral positions at the University of Antwerp and the University of Cambridge.
DR ROBIN MCKENNA
Before coming to Liverpool, I worked in Austria (at the University of Vienna) and Switzerland (at the University of Geneva). I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Most of my research is in epistemology, but I am also interested in philosophy of language, philosophy of science and ethics. Within epistemology, I am increasingly interested in applied epistemology, feminist epistemology and political epistemology. My current projects include the epistemological implications of the (social) psychology of political cognition, social dimensions of knowledge and epistemic injustice. I have taught in a wide range of areas, including epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics and philosophy of language.
DR VID SIMONITI
My academic work is in aesthetics, especially on the political dimensions of art. In recent publications I have considered socially engaged art, anti-racist art and artists’ use of biotechnology. I am also interested in the history of aesthetics (especially Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Frankfurt School) and in philosophy of literature. Before joining the Philosophy department at Liverpool in 2018, I was the Jeffrey Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge. I obtained my doctorate (D.Phil.) from the University of Oxford in 2015.