Faculty of Philosophy
University of Oxford
DPhil Seminar
The DPhil Seminar takes place every Wednesday of term from 16:00 to 17:30 (usually in the Ryle Room). It's an informal, friendly setting in which DPhil students and visiting doctoral students present work at various stages of development, from early drafts to polished thesis chapters, followed by a Q&A. Everyone is welcome to attend (graduate and undergraduate students, staff, interested members of the public, etc.), and after each talk, we meet in the Faculty kitchen for some drinks and snacks.
If you do not hold a university card, please contact the seminar convenor or admin@philosophy.ox.ac.uk at least two working days before a seminar to register your attendance.
DPhil Seminar Convenor: Tom Heywood | DPhil Seminar Website
Michaelmas Term 2026 - Term Card
Past Terms
| Week 1 (29th Apr) | Reginald Chua (Blackfriars College) | A puzzle of relative identity |
| Week 2 (6th May) | Léon Probst (Recognised Student: Università della Svizzera Italiana) | Interpreting Gödel's second incompleteness theorem |
| Week 3 (13th May) | Mhairi Tait (Regent's Park College) | Loving Beauty: Articulating a Puzzle for Feminists |
| Week 4 (20th May) | Cara Addleman (Christ Church College) | Reasons and Resentment: Why the Reactive Attitudes Don't Support Internal Reasons Theory |
| Week 5 (27th May) | John Maier (Balliol College) | Unexceptional Evaluative Perception |
| Week 6 (3rd Jun) | Zhengguan Chen (Recognised Student: Universität Bern) | Sortals, Intension, and Essence |
| Week 7 (10th Jun) | Juan Miguel López Munive (New College) | Negation and semantic presupposition |
| Week 8 (17th Jun) | Thomas Heywood (Reuben College) | Scepticism about Morally Wrongful Belief |
| Week 1 (21st Jan) | Sepehr Razavi (Merton College) | Intuitive Social Cognition |
| Week 2 (28th Jan) | Yotam Harel (Merton College) | Reactivity and the Moral Responsibilities of Scientists |
| Week 3 (4th Feb) | Eve Poirier (The Queen's College) | What Can I Intend to Do? |
| Week 4 (11th Feb) | Ryan Kulesa (St Cross College) | Death is Always Maximally Prudentially Bad |
| Week 5 (18th Feb) | Otto Räsänen (Corpus Christi College) | Two Concepts of Thinking |
| Week 6 (25th Feb) | Pranciškus Gricius (St Hilda's College) | Rigid Classicism |
| Week 7 (4th March) | Rasmus Bakken (Balliol College) | The syntax sensitivity of Truth |
| Week 8 (11th March) | Asia Sakchatchawan (The Queen's College) | Towards a Dramaturgical Theory of Self-Constitution |
| Week 2 (21st Oct) | Yuqi Liang (Oxford) | Peak Experiences |
| Week 3 (29th Oct) | Matt Hitchens | Two kinds of generality |
| Week 4 (5th Nov) | Kenneth Novis (St Hugh's College) | Spinoza and the Politics of Atheism |
| Week 5 (12th Nov) | Patrick Williamson (St Cross College) | Demandingness and Autonomy |
| Week 6 (19th Nov) | Amit Karmon (Reuben College) | Which Ideal Epistemology? |
| Week 7 (26th Nov) | Juan Miguel López Munive (New College) | Logical reconstruction and the metalinguistic turn in modal logic |
| Week 8 (3rd Dec) | Thibault Rushbrooke (Magdalen College) | Radical Semantic Internalism |
| Week 1 (30th April) | Katie Moody | Perspectives and epistemic dependence |
| Week 2 (7th May) | Alina Wang | Being an animal and enjoying fiction |
| Week 3 (14th May) | Jonathan Krude | What is wrong with identifying being and thought? |
| Week 4 (21st May) | Hatis Acar | One Truth is Not Enough: On the Limits of Monist Human Rights Theories |
| Week 5 (28th May) | Kida Ling | Minor Threateners and Wrongful Killings in War |
| Week 6 (4th June) | Pranciskus Gricius | On Typed Reality |
| Week 7 (11th June) | Julian Ratcliffe | Conceptual Agency |
| Week 8 (18th June) | Julius Geissler | What is the "central area of moral philosophy"? - Religious orientation and the shortcomings of contemporary ethics in Iris Murdoch |
| Week 1 (22nd Jan) | Miguel Lopez Munive | Possible-words semantics for a partial necessity predicate |
| Week 3 (5th Feb) | Óscar Monroy | Ideology and the commitments of abductive methodology |
| Week 4 (12th Feb) | Lewis Williams | Deliberative Extra-Normativism |
| Week 5 (19th Feb) | Jakob Lohmar | Moral Theory and the Importance of the Far Future |
| Week 6 (26th Feb) | Mariona Miyata Sturm | Effortless elegance and other epistemic pleasures |
| Week 7 (5th March) | Evie Moss | Dynamic Desire: Explaining our Privileged Access to Dispositional States |
| Week 8 (12th March) | Julius Geissler | A mismatch between heaven, earth, and human beings: practical cultivation and the purpose of divinatory practices in the Xìcí Zhuàn繫辭傳 |
| Week 1 (16th Oct) | Sally Atkins | Asking for Ourselves: Recognition of Other Reasoners in Kant |
| Week 2 (23rd Oct) | Riley Harris | Identifying Artificial Sentience |
| Week 3 (30th Oct) | Sepehr Razavi | What is Active Touch |
| Week 4 (6th Nov) | Jacob Mortimer | The 'Time-Lag Argument' in Early Buddhist Theories of Perception |
| Week 5 (13th Nov) | James Glover | The positivist foundations of Frank Ramsey's philosophy of science |
| Week 6 (20th Nov) | Jonathan Krude | Heidegger on Overcoming Metaphysics |
| Week 7 (27th Nov) | Niklas Welch | Thinking about things and thinking about oneself: Heidegger's critique of Descartes |
| Week 8 (4th Dec) | Frank Cudek | Theoretical Possibility and Spacetime Substantivalism |