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Society

Of social life and social science

Social ontology

Social ontology studies the nature of social kinds and investigates the foundations, methods, and implications of social science for social metaphysics and our understanding of the world we have built around ourselves. Not all things in the world are created by nature: society creates much of what there is, and much of what we take immutable natural fact is heavily constituted by the interactions of social creature. Nations, golf clubs, the rules of chess, inflation, and gender and race are all social kinds. What is the nature of these various social kinds? How many kinds of social kinds are there? How mutable are they? And how should the results of natural and social science inform our understanding of social kinds?

Katharine Jenkins, one of our principal researchers in social ontology, is the chief editor of the journal Hypatia, the leading publication in analytic feminist philosophy and a major research outlet for work in social ontology.

Principal researchers

Leads: Katharine Jenkins, Matilda Carter

Phd students: Annalisa Muscolo, Han Edgoose

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Education

Our research stream in the practical and theoretical questions around education brings together other areas of philosophy with educational research to answer two broad sets of questions. The first concerns the aims of education and how we deliver them, especially in light of challenges from epistemology and from new developments in educational technology. The second concerns distributive justice in this domain, in particular investigating what principles should guide access to, and resources for, different kinds of childhood and adult education.

Principal researchers

Leads: Ben Colburn, Adam Carter, Mona Simion

Phd students: Michael Quinn

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