Philosophy, University of Otago

The recently released PBRF report (the governmental measure of research excellence in New Zealand) has ranked Philosophy at Otago first amongst Philosophy Departments in New Zealand (for the third time running) and the second highest ranked department in any subject at any institution in the country. Otago Philosophy was the top scoring department across all subjects and institutions in 2003 and 2006, but this time we were just pipped by Otago's excellent Psychology Department.

We are delighted to announce the publication of the second edition of Alex Miller's Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction, from Polity Press. The book gives a critical overview of the main arguments and topics in contemporary metaethics. This new edition includes revised and updated guides and new material on fictionalism. The book can be ordered from the publisher's website.

Candidates should have demonstrated outstanding research and teaching strengths in Early Modern (17th and 18th century) Philosophy. As well as being actively engaged in research, the successful applicant will be expected to teach core undergraduate papers in Early Modern Philosophy and to supervise research students at honours and postgraduate levels in this area. Many current graduate students come from outside New Zealand and an appointment that will attract graduate students to Otago is valued.

For application information, a full job description, and further information about living and working in Otago go to:

We are delighted to announce that Professor Alan Musgrave has received the 2012 Humanities Aronui Medal from the Royal Society of New Zealand for his enduring and profound influence as a philosopher of science.

The Humanities Aronui Medal is awarded annually for research or innovative work of outstanding merit in the Humanities.

Professor Musgrave is primarily interested in the nature of scientific knowledge and in the history of science, publishing on Ptolemy, Lavoisier, Darwin, Einstein and others. He has been a steadfast and influential defender of the theses of scientific rationality and scientific realism against competing schools of thought, such as post-structuralism.

Professor Musgrave observes: "When you have spent your life doing work it is very nice to learn that people don't think you have been wasting your time."

We are delighted to announce that Dr Zach Weber has received a Marsden Fund Fast Start Grant, 2013-2016. Zach's project is Models of Paradox in Non-Classical Mereotopology. This project will give a new description of logical paradoxes, explaining them through mathematical models based on non-classical logics. A position for a fully-funded PhD candidate is available.

It is with deep regret that we announce the death of Annette Baier, who passed away at 2:00 am on Friday the 2nd of November, 2012 in Dunedin hospital, where she had been admitted, following heart problems, earlier in the week. She was 83.

Friends and students of Annette – and we know she had friends the world over - will be pleased to know that she was active in philosophy right up to the last, attending and contributing to the Otago Departmental Seminar with her usual wit and acuity to within a few weeks of her death. Her last comment was a criticism of the error theory of her friend and former colleague J.L Mackie. She will be sorely missed.

Emily Irwin, a philosophy student at Otago, has been awarded 'highly commended' in the recent Humanities Mobile Phone Competition. She made this video about studying philosophy at Otago using just a mobile phone, and in only two hours. We think she did a great job!

We are delighted to announce a new book, from Springer, Rationis Defensor: Essays in Honour of Colin Cheyne. This is a volume of previously unpublished essays celebrating the life and work of Colin Cheyne. Colin is a past Head of the Department of Philosophy and is the immediate past President of the Australasian Association for Philosophy (New Zealand Division). He is the author of Knowledge, Cause, and Abstract Objects: Causal Objections to Platonism (Springer, 2001) and the editor, with Vladimir Svoboda and Bjorn Jespersen, of Pavel Tichy’s Collected Papers in Logic and Philosophy (University of Otago Press, 2005) and, with John Worrall, of Rationality and Reality: Conversations with Alan Musgrave (Springer, 2006). The volume, edited by James Maclaurin, celebrates the dedication to rational enquiry and the philosophical style of Colin Cheyne. It also celebrates the distinctive brand of naturalistic philosophy for which Otago has become known. Contributors to the volume include a wide variety of philosophers, all with a personal connection to Colin, and all of whom are, in their own way, defenders of rationality.

Professor Alex Miller has joined the Department. Formerly at the University of Birmingham, Alex did his undergraduate work in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Glasgow and his graduate work in philosophy at the University of St. Andrews and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Alex works mainly in the areas of philosophy of language and mind, metaethics and metaphysics and has published widely on these topics. He is currently working on the role of normativity arguments in the theory of meaning and metaethics, and on developing a new interpretation of Kripkes Wittgenstein's skeptical argument about meaning.

We are delighted to announce that Dr Zach Weber joined the Department at the start of 2012. Zach received his doctorate from Melbourne in 2009; his thesis, Paradox and Foundation, was on the philosophy and mathematics of set theory and was supervised by Graham Priest and Greg Restall.

From September 2008 to May 2009 Zach was a research fellow at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney, under the direction of Mark Colyvan. He worked on the ARC funded project A Paraconsistent Approach to Vagueness.

From June 2009 to February 2010 Zach was with us at Otago, tutoring and guest lecturing in logic, and working as a research assistant with Heather Dyke. Since then he has been a postdoctoral research fellow on the ARC project Paraconsistent Foundations of Mathematics at Melbourne.

Zach's work has appeared in journals such as Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, Analysis, and the Journal of Philosophical Logic.

This Special Collections exhibition is open until 23 September. Combining classics from the past and cutting-edge works of the present day, it brings together books on philosophy, science, literature and medicine. Together they illustrate the theme of Experimental Philosophy as it was understood and practised 350 years ago and as it is understood today. The on-line version can be viewed here.

We are delighted to announce a new book, from Harvard University Press, by Departmental Associate Annette Baier. The publisher's blurb reads as follows: 'Marking the tercentenary of David Hume’s birth, Annette Baier has created an engaging guide to the philosophy of one of the greatest thinkers of Enlightenment Britain. Drawing deeply on a lifetime of scholarship and incisive commentary, she deftly weaves Hume’s autobiography together with his writings and correspondence, finding in these personal experiences new ways to illuminate his ideas about religion, human nature, and the social order.'

We are pleased to announce that the Appeal to honour Professor Alan Musgrave has now raised sufficient funds to enable the establishment of a scholarship. For more details visit the Appeal site.

The University of Otago Library has launched a new and much expanded Subject Guide for Philosophy. The new site includes guides to finding philosophy articles, books and reviews; fun and useful philosophy websites; links to popular philosophy publications; and a constantly updated list of the library's new philosophy titles.

Professor Peter Anstey is currently the Principal Investigator of a Marsden-funded project (2009–2011) on 'Experimental Philosophy and the Origins of Empiricism'. Other researchers on the project include Alberto Vanzo, Juan Manuel Gomez, Kirsten Walsh and Dr Richard Serjeantson (Trinity College, Cambridge). You can visit the project blog here .

An edited collection, Hume on Is and Ought has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan.

It ‘seems altogether inconceivable’, says Hume, that this ‘new relation’ ought ‘can be a deduction’ from others ‘which are entirely different from it'. The idea that you can’t derive an ought from an is, moral conclusions from non-moral premises, has proved enormously influential. But what did Hume mean by this famous dictum? Was he correct? How does it fit in with the rest of his philosophy? This collection, the first on this topic for forty years, assembles a distinguished cast of international scholars to discuss these questions.

Pigden Is and Ought

The book is available from Amazon here.

An edited collection, Hume on Motivation and Virtue has just been published by Palgrave Macmillan. It is edited by Charles Pigden and contains essays by, among others, Annette Baier, Rosalind Hursthouse, Richard Joyce, Graham Oddie, and Michael Smith.

Pigden Hume Motivation and Virtue

In 2007 the Otago Philosophy Department was the top-scoring philosophy department, the top-scoring department at the university and the top-scoring research department of any kind in New Zealand, according to the PBRF (the New Zealand equivalent of the British RAE). In the 2003 PBRF round, the Otago department also came top, but in 2007 we improved our score, going up from 6.6 to 7.5.

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