Philosophy Research Group (PRG)

The Philosophy Research Group supports excellence in philosophical research

The Philosophy Research Group supports excellence in philosophical research. We are active across a broad spectrum of areas, including theoretical philosophy (philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology), practical philosophy (ethics, political philosophy), and applied philosophy (philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, philosophy of technology, philosophy of education). We are open and inclusive, welcoming participation from across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Projects

Emotions, Identity, and the Self

We explore different types of affective experience (e.g. regret and self-esteem) and their role in various aspects of our life, including their ethical and interpersonal relevance. We are also interested in the relationship between emotions, self-experience and self-knowledge, and how personal identities are shaped and negotiated. 

Realisms and Normative Political Philosophy The Experience of Health and Illness

People

Director

Rob is the director of The Philosophy Research Group and a lecturer in philosophy at Swansea University. His areas of research expertise are metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mathematics.

Dr Rob Knowles

Staff and Student Members

Professor Janet Goodall

Dr Fritz-Gregor Herrmann

Student Members: 

Lucia Morgans 

Kamila Kulik 

Charles Clement 

Academic Publications

Dr Anna Bortolan

Title	Description
Bortolan, A. 2023. Healing Online? Social Anxiety and Emotion Regulation in Pandemic Experience. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 22: 1195-1214.	This paper explores how the experience of social anxiety and emotion regulation may be impacted upon by the use of internet-mediated communication fostered by the pandemic of Covid-19.
Bortolan, A. 2022. Selves Hijacked: Affects and Personhood in 'Self-Illness Ambiguity'. Philosophical Explorations 25 (3): 343-362.	This paper investigates from a phenomenological perspective the origins of self-illness ambiguity. Drawing on phenomenological theories of affectivity and selfhood, it argues that, as a phenomenon which concerns primarily the ‘personal self’, self-illness ambiguity is dependent on distinct alterations of affective background orientations. More specifically, it suggests that self-illness ambiguity originates in the presence of moods or existential feelings that are in tension with the ones that structure the person’s experience prior to the onset of the illness or when its symptoms are not experienced.
Bortolan, A. 2021. Narrate It Until You Become It. Journal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (4): 474-493.	This paper provides an extended account of how the engagement with certain narratives can lead to a transformation of one's sense of possibility by eliciting affective experiences that are not consonant with the person's “existential feelings”. More precisely, it claims that, even when the experience of some types of emotion is generally precluded by a restricted sense of possibility, such emotions may be aroused by particular self-narratives, and it explores how this dynamic can give rise to enduring and wide-ranging affective changes.
Bortolan, A. 2020. Affectivity and the Distinction Between Minimal and Narrative Self. Continental Philosophy Review 53: 67-84.	This paper discusses the claim that the minimal and narrative self complement each other but are fundamentally distinct dimensions. In particular, it challenges the idea that while the presence of a minimal self is a condition of possibility for the emergence of a narrative self, the dynamics which characterise narrative selfhood do not have a structuring effect on minimal self-experience. It does so by showing that at least certain forms of affective experience are complex phenomena in which minimal and narrative forms of selfhood are deeply entwined.

Dr Gideon Calder

Calder, G. 2024. Social exclusion and poverty. In G. Schweiger and C. Semak (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Poverty. (Routledge)
Sanghera, B. and Calder, G. (eds.) 2022. Ethics, Economy and Social Science: Dialogues with Andrew Sayer. Routledge.
Cheshire-Allen, M. and Calder, G. 2022. No-one was clapping for us: Care, social justice and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic in Wales. International Journal of Care and Caring, 6 (1-2): 49-66.
Gheaus, A., Calder, G. and De Wispelaere, J. (eds.) 2018. The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children. Routledge.

Dr Patrick Cockburn

Cockburn , P. J. L. (under contract for 2026) Two Stories about Economic Life: An introduction to Normative Political Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Cockburn, P. J. L. & Preminger, J. 2023. Migration and Demos in the Democratic Firm: An Extension of the State-Firm Analogy. Political Theory, 51(3), 557-580.
Cockburn, P.J.L. 2023. Varieties of Economic Dependence. European Journal of Political Theory 22(2),195-216.

Dr Leighton Evans

Evans, L., Frith, J. and Saker, M. 2022. From Microverse to Metaverse: Modelling the Future through Today's Virtual Worlds. Emerald.
Saker, M. and Evans, L. 2021. Intergenerational Locative Play: Augmenting Family. Emerald.
Evans, L. 2018. The Re-Emergence of Virtual Reality. Routledge.
Evans, L. and Saker, M. 2017. Location-based Social Media: Spatiality, Temporality and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan.
Evans, L. 2015. Locative Social Media: Place in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan.

Dr Rob Knowles

Title	Description
Knowles, R. 2022. No Grounds for Fictionalism. Philosophical Studies 179 (12): 3679-3687.	This paper argues that fictionalism about grounding is unmotivated, focusing on Naomi Thompson’s (2022) recent proposal that the utility of the grounding fiction lies in its facilitating communication about what metaphysically explains what.
Knowles, R. 2021. Platonic Relations and Mathematical Explanations. Philosophical Quarterly 71 (3): 623-644. 2021.	Some scientific explanations appear to turn on pure mathematical claims. The enhanced indispensability argument appeals to these ‘mathematical explanations’ in support of mathematical platonism. I argue that the success of this argument rests on the claim that mathematical explanations locate pure mathematical facts on which their physical explananda depend, and that any account of mathematical explanation that supports this claim fails to provide an adequate understanding of mathematical explanation.
Knowles, R. 2021. Unification and mathematical explanation. Philosophical Studies 178 (12): 3923-3943. 2021.	This paper evaluates the view that mathematical explanations in science explain by unifying. Illustrating with some novel examples, I argue that the view is misguided. For believers in mathematical explanations in science, my discussion rules out one way of spelling out how they work, bringing us one step closer to the right way. For non-believers, it contributes to a divide-and-conquer strategy for showing that there are no such explanations in science. My discussion also undermines the appeal to unifying power in support of the enhanced indispensability argument.
Knowles, R. and Saatsi, J. 2021. Mathematics and Explanatory Generality: Nothing but Cognitive Salience. Erkenntnis 86 (5): 1119-1137.	The paper makes progress in the debate surrounding the enhanced indispensability argument by drawing on a counterfactual theory of explanation, motivated independently of the debate, to provide a novel analysis of mathematics’ contribution to ‘explanatory generality’. Mathematics’ contribution is to make counterfactual information about physical dependencies easier to grasp and reason with for creatures like us. This gives precise content to key intuitions traded in the debate and adjudicates unambiguously in favour of the nominalist, at least as far as explanatory generality is concerned.

Dr Paddy McQueen

McQueen, P. 2024. Regret. Oxford University Press
Magri, E. and McQueen, P. 2023. Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction. Polity Press
McQueen, P. 2021. ‘Sexual Interactions and Sexual Infidelity’. Journal of Ethics, 25: 449-466

Latest News and Events

Philosophy Research Group Launch Event

In 2024, we celebrated the launch of the PRG by hosting a conference. The conference showcased the diversity of philosophical research conducted at Swansea and our connections with the broader philosophical community. Speakers included:

Ian Kidd (University of Nottingham)
Jane Gatley (Swansea University)
Professor Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton)
Rob Knowles (Swansea University)

Awards and Grants

Dr Gideon Calder

2021 Health and Care Research Wales: £388,200, COVID-19 impact on the support and management of older people in Wales: The COSMO study.
2018 Welsh Government: £487,874, Evaluation of the Social Services and Well-Being (Wales) Act 2014.

Dr Leighton Evans

2023 Recipient of the Dillwyn Medal in Social Sciences, Business and Education from the Learned Society of Wales in recognition of research.
2023 Recipient of Swansea University Academy of Teaching and Learning Excellence in Teaching Award.
2023 - RIR1048 - 2022/23 - Arts and Humanities Research Council - UKRI IMPACT ACCELERATION ACCOUNTS. Game Changing Project. £40,502.99
Rzsezewski, M. and Evans, L. (2019). Award of 586086 PLN (£116,000) for project Space-software-human: Augmented Reality of the Smart City from National Science Centre, Poland. 36 months from January 2020.

Philosophy Research Group (PRG)

The Philosophy Research Group supports excellence in philosophical research

Projects

People

Director

Academic Publications

Latest News and Events

Awards and Grants

Contact Philosophy Research Group (PRG)

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