Engaged philosophy
‘Engaged Philosophy’ sums up the work in the department that makes a difference in the wider world, by engaging on a practical level with real-world problems and by bringing philosophy to an audience beyond academia.
- Dr James Andow is interested in the ethics of conceptual engineering; the ethics of professional practice in other areas (education and geoengineering); and climate ethics. He is working on the ethics of carbon pricing (on fairness) and carbon footprints (on communitarian duties). He is also working on an empirical project examining student perceptions of AI-generated feedback.
- Dr Justina Berškytė works on semantics and social philosophy of language. Her work focuses on context sensitivity, derogatory speech (e.g. slurs), gender terms, online communities (e.g. Incels), social practices, ideologies and masculinities. She is currently a postdoc research associate on the Rebuilding Trust in Public Discourse: The Good Speech Project (PI: Dr Mihaela Popa-Wyatt). From May 2025 she will start a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship on a project entitled The Language of Misogyny: Meaning, Function, and Possible Interventions.
- Dr Stephen Ingram has interests in philosophy of education. He is especially interested in moral education, and has forthcoming work exploring a pedagogical variation on the 'now what?' question for moral error theorists. He is researching the ethical and epistemic norms that govern the teaching of controversial issues, with a view to shaping practice in higher education. He is also interested in the use of deception in pedagogical contexts, the distribution of educational resources, and educating for intellectual virtue.
- Dr Frederique Janssen-Lauret works on diversity in philosophy and, in particular, the role - and marginalisation - of women in the history of philosophy. She has published papers on Susan Stebbing, Christine Ladd-Franklin and Constance Jones, Elizabeth of Bohemia and women in Logical Empiricism, and on using texts by women in teaching philosophical logic.
- Dr Sarah Kerr is a sociologist of wealth developing an ontology of wealth in the Philosophy Department at Manchester. Her interest is in whether insights from economic sociologists in the last 5 years (from the early 2020s) are adequately accounted for in existing ontologies of money, and if not, whether a specific account of the ontology of wealth is useful. Sarah works with a wide range of social change organisations. There is a growing sense of a need to more fully understand what is distinct about wealth, what kind of problem it is – and isn’t - and relatedly, what can be done about it. This ontology will feed into that conversation. She is also producing a history of Irish wealth in the UK, telling the story of the colonial dispossession of Irish land, and what relationships to land (legal and cultural) preceded anglicisation, and how this might provide context for the enduringly low wealth holdings of Irish people in the UK. This will support work being done to understand how to account for and remedy contemporary inequalities with their roots in past injustices, and specifically, how to account for the effect of colonialism on the contemporary racial wealth divide. Sarah is host of Antisocial Economics podcast where she talks to academics and campaigners about their work and ideas, and she has talked about her own work on Radio 4's Thinking Allowed.
- Dr Raamy Majeed works primarily on the philosophy of emotion and has published across the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of race.
- Prof. John O’Neill works at the intersection of philosophy, political economy, environmental policy, political theory, and ethics. He has been involved in numerous funded projects concerning aspects of environmental sustainability and social justice, including BIOMOT and the Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade project (EJOLT), both funded by the EU; Climate Change, Justice and Vulnerability and Social Justice and the Future of Flood Insurance (both Joseph Rowntree Foundation), and Green Infrastructure and the Health and Wellbeing Influences on an Ageing Population (GHIA). His interest in ageing also resulted in the co-authored report, Dementia, Vulnerability and Well-being: Living Well with Dementia Together.
- Dr Mihaela Popa-Wyatt works on the intersection of philosophy of language and social and political philosophy, social epistemology, and philosophy of race and gender. Her recent work focuses on how slurs and oppressive speech shift social norms and re-entrench social hierarchies. She previously led the project Online Harms and Trust, and currently leads Rebuilding Trust in Public Discourse: The Good Speech Project.
- Dr Ann Whittle has interests in the intersection of freedom, responsibility, and artificial intelligence. In a recent grant project, she collaborated with computer scientists to examine prospective responsibility in AI systems. In another, she analysed degrees of possible responsibility in AI and how these map onto different forms of risk for human agents. These projects aim to bring philosophical clarity to emerging debates about AI governance and accountability. A further applied strand concerns the implications of the theoretical work for responsibility in cases of neurodivergence and psychological disorder. Here she explores how variations in cognitive architecture, emotional regulation and developmental pathways shape the conditions under which responsibility is appropriately attributed. This work seeks to bridge philosophical theorising with empirical psychology and clinical practice.
- Prof. Jon Williamson works on the use of causality, probability and inference methods in science, medicine, AI and law. He has been working recently on methods for evaluating evidence, arguing for an approach that exploits mechanistic evidence alongside the associative evidence that is the focus of orthodox review methods. Projects have included the UKRI-funded Interdisciplinary Systematic Review, as well as EBL+, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Themes
Environmental sustainability
The focus of this theme is on environmental justice and the economic valuation of environmental goods. We are concerned with how we should value the environment, the limits of market valuations, our attitudes towards the environment and motivations to act on them, and environmental justice.
People: John O’Neill, James Andow.
Inequality
Inequality is on the agenda with a renewed sense of urgency. This headline in The Guardian from September 2026 describes efforts by leading economists to urgently address the growing gap between the richest and the poorest – a product, they say, of ‘a policy choice that can be reversed’. There are many reasons to be concerned about economic inequality – from its impact on productivity, to the spillover effects into a wide range of harms – social, democratic, environmental. And there are many reasons to be concerned about other forms of what might be called ‘categorical’ inequality (between men and women, between different racialised groups, for example). Engaging philosophy with these questions can add useful insight to debates that can often produce more heat than light.
People: Sarah Kerr, Raamy Majeed, Jon Williamson
Find out more: Antisocial Economics podcast , Thinking Allowed, Changing the Narrative on Wealth Inequality.
AI governance and responsibility
Responsible AI and governance aim to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed and deployed safely, ethically and transparently. This work raises profound questions: how do we manage AI risks in complex, evolving systems? How do we build AI that respects human rights and earns public trust? And as artificial agents become increasingly woven into our social landscapes, how should they fit within our ethical communities and practices? Responsible AI is not only a technical challenge but a societal one — requiring thoughtful design, accountable governance, and a careful evaluation of the values we wish to uphold.
People: Ann Whittle, Jon Williamson
Better evidence
How should we judge whether interventions – e.g., medicines, public policies and laws – are effective? How should we establish causal claims in the health and social sciences? Evidential Pluralism, a philosophical theory of causal enquiry, seeks to answer these questions. We engage with evaluators to explore how Evidential Pluralism can usefully inform methods for evidence review.
People: Jon Williamson, Luana Poliseli Ramos, Sahanika Ratnayake, Sarah Kerr
Find out more: Evidential Pluralism Mitigates Epistemic Injustice in Evidence-Based Evaluation, EBP+: Integrating science into policy evaluation using Evidential Pluralism
Other themes of interest include:
Public discourse: Mihaela Popa-Wyatt, Justina Berškytė, Stephen Ingram
Diversity, particularly in relation to philosophy education and philosophy of race: Frederique Janssen-Lauret, Raamy Majeed, Ajinkya Desmukh
Polarisation: Raamy Majeed, Sarah Kerr
Press and Media
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