Social Philosophy

Social philosophy scrutinises our social world, and looks at the identities, relations, and power structures within it. Some social philosophy is concerned with what makes up our social world - what social kinds, such as race or gender or class, are. Social philosophy also examines the ways that, for instance, social relations or power dynamics affect our experiences of ourselves and the world (phenomenology), our knowledge-seeking practices (social epistemology), our language and concepts (applied philosophy of language), or the specifically social aspects of our cognition (how we think about social kinds, or navigate social norms). It also encompasses how all of these aspects interact with social structures, both informal ones, such as friendship groups or family structures, and formal ones such as the workplace, or institutions such as marriage. Much social philosophy is done with an eye on how we might change things in order to make our social world better (theorists engaged in anti-racist and feminist philosophy often have this goal in mind).

The department has considerable strengths in social philosophy, reflected both in the research interests of members of the department, the teaching at undergraduate level, and postgraduate supervision. Undergraduates can take modules in feminist philosophy, phenomenology - with a focus on the phenomenology of race and gender - and social philosophy.

Philosophy of Race and racism

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc’s current work on the philosophy of Frantz Fanon considers both race and racism from a phenomenological perspective. Jenny Saul is currently working on racist language, with particular attention to ways that politicians convey racist messages non-explicitly. She has also worked on implicit bias.  Jules Holroyd works on implicit bias (in particular on holding people and institutions responsible for gender and racial biases), understandings of discrimination, and how implicit biases may have a role in sustaining institutional racism. Jules Holroyd has also been working with cognitive psychologists to examine the ways in which we think about race and class interact. Megan Blomfield is looking at the UK asylum claim system from the perspective of theories of epistemic injustice; that is, theories about how people can be harmed as subjects and sources of knowledge, such as when their word is undermined through the operation of racist and sexist stereotypes. Ben Davies has worked on issues of racial discrimination in healthcare, and whether it can be legitimate to consider this in resource allocation.

Philosophy of gender & feminism

Komarine Romdenh-Romluc has worked on various issues in feminist philosophy, including epistemic injustice and the nature of gender from a phenomenological perspective.

Jennifer Saul wrote the 2003 textbook Feminism: Issues and Arguments. She has written on feminist philosophy of language, gender, sexual harassment, implicit bias, and pornography. Jules Holroyd has done work in various areas of feminist philosophy, looking at implicit bias and epistemic injustice, implicit gender bias and collective vice, feminist perspectives on metaethics, feminist metaphysics, and feminist contributions to debates about well-being. She will be convening the feminist philosophy module for second and third years in 2020-2021, which covers topics such as how feminists have proposed work and economic relations might be reformed, proposals for restructuring the family, reproductive justice, and feminist perspectives on the climate crisis. Through his work on the Danish philosopher and theologian K. E. Løgstrup, Bob Stern has an interest in the tradition of care ethics which is often also associated with feminism. Chris Bennett has worked on the question of whether a liberal state should give the institution of two-person marriage privileged legal status.

Robbie Morgan works on feminist philosophy where this intersects with issues in sexual ethics, including on  the concepts of sexualisation and objectification, and examines the sexist biases that inform accounts of what it is for an act to be sexual. Yonatan Shemmer is interested in some debates in the feminist literature that bear on questions of consent and on questions of freedom of speech.