Professor George Botterill

George moved to Sheffield in 1988. He had previously taught at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, where he had worked since completing his undergraduate and postgraduate studies under Simon Blackburn's supervision at Pembroke College, Oxford. His main research interests are in philosophy of psychology and philosophy of science (in which he is an advocate of Lakatos's Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes). The Department's involvement in cognitive studies through the work of the Hang Seng Centre provides a natural opportunity to exploit interconnections between these two areas.

Important issues here, as elsewhere in philosophy, depend upon the concept of causation, and it has been an ambition of George's to develop a satisfactory realist account of causation. He is currently trying to do that by applying a contrastive model of causal explanation.