Skip to main content

Supervision

Supervision

I am available for, and interested in, supervising students, at any level, in any of the following areas:

  • History of logic
  • Logic (mathematical, philosophical, modal, etc.)
  • Philosophy of language (especially philosophy of fiction)
  • Philosophy of logic
  • Philosophy of mathematics
  • Medieval philosophy (especially logic/philosophy of language)
  • Informal argumentation
  • Human and machine reasoning

If you are a student at Durham and interested in working with me, please send me an email to set up an appointment to meet. If you are not currently a student at Durham, but are interested in being supervised by me, please see the departmental pages on taught degrees and research degrees to see the possible opportunities.

Current students

  1. Yimika Adenusi, BA, philosoph & psychology (Durham)
  2. Zekiye Goz, PhD, philosophy (Durham)
  3. Mingyue Liu, PhD, computer science (Durham)
  4. Caitlin Moeran, BA, natural sciences (Durham)
  5. Grishma Muppidi, BA, natural sciences (Durham)
  6. Lucas Osborn, BA, philosophy (Durham)
  7. Yan Xu, PhD, philosophy (Durham)
  8. Amber Young, BA, PPE (Durham)
  9. Felipe Zárate Guerrero, PhD, philosophy (Durham)

Previous supervision & examination

Supervision of PhDs as primary or secondary supervisor

  1. Wei Xie (PhD, linguistics, Durham 2023), “The Essentialist Construction of Tense and the Format of a Universal Grammar”
  2. Andrew Thomas (PhD, philosophy, Durham 2021), “Extended Modal Realism: a New Solution to Problems of Non-existence and Intentionality”
  3. Susan Notess (PhD, philosophy, Durham 2021), “Listening and Normative Entanglement: A Pragmatic Foundation for Conversational Ethics”
  4. Andrew Woodard (PhD, philosophy, Durham 2019), “Predication and Identity in Copular Sentences”

Membership in PhD thesis committees, external referee, internal and external examiner

Adam Foxon (PhD, history, Bishop Grosseteste University 2022), Julie Lundbak Kofod (PhD, philosophy, Roskilde University 2022), Christophe Geudens (PhD, philosophy, KULeuven 2020), Ştefan Sarkadi (PhD, informatics, King’s College London 2020), Thomas J. Hughes (PhD, philosophy, Durham, 2015)

Supervision of Diplomas and Master’s degrees

  1. Camelia Cazan (Master of Data Science, Durham 2024), “The Ethics of ChatGPT”
  2. Cheks Nweze (Master of Data Science, Durham 2024), “The Use Of Reinforcement Learning Methods in Creating Strong Fighting Game AI”
  3. Fan Yu (Master of Data Science, Durham 2023), “Machine Learning with TF-IDF Features Extraction for Sentiment Analysis of Movie Reviews”
  4. Yuting An (Master of Data Science, Durham 2023), “Exploration of Sentiment Analysis Based on RNN, LSTM, BERT Model and Sentiment Analysis on Twitter Data”
  5. David Huang (Master of Data Science, Durham 2023), “Political Leaning in Forum Discussion: A Look into Chinese NLP”
  6. Isabella Roper (Master of Data Science, Durham 2023), “Trust and Big Data in the Covid-19 Pandemic: What is Necessary to Promote Trust in Data?”
  7. Nico Tansley (MA, philosophy, Durham 2022)
  8. Susan Notess (Graduate Diploma, philosophy, Durham 2016), “Sacred Languages: A Phenomenological and Pragmatic Account of Sacred Language Use”
  9. Andrew Thomas (MA, philosophy, Durham 2016), “What is Anna Karenina? How Fictional Realism can help dissolve the Paradox of Fictional Emotions”
  10. Antonio Florio (Master of Logic, Amsterdam 2012), “Science in Axiomatic Perspective”
  11. Caroline Foster (Master of Logic, Amsterdam 2008), “The Problem of the Perfect Agent: Investigations into Determinism”

Membership in Master’s thesis committees, external referee, internal and external examiner

Joshua Patterson (MRes, philosophy, Oxford Brookes 2017), Spencer Johnston (Master of Logic, Amsterdam 2011), Lars Wortel (Master of Logic, Amsterdam 2011)

Supervision of undergraduate theses

  1. Francesca Hibbit (BA, philosophy, Durham, 2023), “Iris Murdoch and the Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance”
  2. Venetia Moir (BA, philosophy, Durham 2023), “Inconsistency or Incompleteness”
  3. Kit Moore (BA, philosophy, Durham 2023), “An Investigation into the Ockham-Burley-Pseudo-Sherwood Solution to the Liar and a Possible ‘Sherwoodian’ Response”
  4. Simon Schmahl (BA, philosophy, Durham 2023), “Presumptuous Ravens: An Expansive Analysis of and Compatible Suppositional Solution to Hempel’s Raven Paradox”
  5. Máté Szebenyi (BA, philosophy & psychology, Durham 2023), “Conscious and Language in the Age of Natural Language Processing”
  6. Joshua Yarrow (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2023), “An Aretaic Semantics for Deontic Logic”
  7. Alim Demirbag (BA, philosophy, Durham 2022), “Logical Models for Scientific Reasoning and Conceptual Revolutions”
  8. Benedict Gardner (BA, philosophy, Durham 2022), “Cosmological Unity in the Presocratics and the Upanisads”
  9. Pete Ryall (BA, philosophy & psychology, Durham 2022), “Narreality: Stories of Selves”
  10. Charlotte Chevrie (BA, philosophy, Durham 2021), “Information in the natural world: a new attempt at solving the combination problem for Panpsychism”
  11. Annie Cole (BA, philosophy & psychology, Durham 2021), “Towards solving the identity problem for In Re Structuralism”
  12. David Millross (BA, philosophy, Durham 2021), “Are unicorns non-existent? Understanding a 17th Century Buddhist logician’s justification of nonexistence proofs and wider account of āśrayāsiddha”
  13. Jarren Santos (BA, philosophy, Durham 2021), “A framework for Code-Switching through the application of Propositional Dynamic Logic”
  14. Ana Truesdale (BA, liberal arts, Durham 2021), “To what extent does gendered language in Spanish inform machismo culture in the Spanish speaking world?”
  15. Tristan Ashley, (BA, philosophy & psychology, Durham 2020), “Mean Something?”
  16. Charles Bland * (BA, philosophy, Durham 2020), “Should New Axioms Be Added to the Foundations of Mathematics?”
  17. Sissy Chen (BA, philosophy & English, Durham, 2020), “Towards a Theory of Meaningful Language: Investigating Metaphors”
  18. Tom Katon (BA, liberal arts, Durham 2020), “The IQ of AI: What Does it Mean to Call AI ‘Intelligent’?”
  19. George Singleton (BA, philosophy, Durham 2020), “The Unready-to-Hand Body: A Phenomenological Analysis of Anorexia Nervosa”
  20. Nicholas Tansley (BA, philosophy, Durham 2020), “Junk-Time: A Cybernetic Theory of Mind and Addiction in Postmodernity”
  21. Kelly Wong (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2020), “Does the Mathematical Structuralists’ Ontology Shape Reality?”
  22. Amber Mullins (BA, philosophy, Durham, 2019), “A Philosophical Analysis of the Nonsense in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Through the Looking-Glass“
  23. Richard Burn (BA, philosophy, Durham 2018), “Identity of Fictional Characters Across and Within Media”
  24. Luciana di Mascio (BA, philosophy & psychology, Durham 2018), “A Philosophical Analysis of J.K. Rowling’s Account of Life After Death in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter”
  25. Samin Gokeckus * (BA, philosophy & psychology, Durham 2018), “Elizabeth Hamilton’s Early 19th Century Scottish Associationism; Tracking Modern Developmental Psychology and Neuroscience”
  26. Grace Greer (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2018), “Do Mathematical Statements Have Objective Truth-Values?”
  27. Tom Rojas (BA, philosophy, Durham 2018), “Can Pascal’s Wager Resist Infinitesimal Probabilities?”
  28. Tomas Bermejo (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2017) “Carnap and Quine’s Debate on Ontology”
  29. Nathan Davies (BA, philosophy, Durham 2017), “A Meaningless Dissertation: Why Meaning Can’t be Analysed in Terms of Truth”
  30. Amber Donovan * (BA, philosophy, Durham 2017), “Egotistical Investigations: Diagnosing the Problem of My ‘Self'”
  31. Dan Foggin (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2017), “Where Are They? A Solution to the Fermi Paradox Using the Anthropic Principle”
  32. Daniel Fox (BA, philosophy & physics, Durham 2017), “Towards a New Conception of Human Rights”
  33. Andrea Mikulandova (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2017), “Using Temporal Logic to Construct a Model of Restricted Time Travel Via Time Turners”
  34. Constance O’Conor (BA, philosophy, Durham 2017), “The Fairy Tale Paradox: Logical and Ethical Tensions in Teaching Fantastic Morals by Fantastic Means”
  35. Sophie Oliver (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2017), “Realism in Mathematics: Set Theoretic Commitment to the Infinite”
  36. Sam Courtney-Guy (BA, PPE, Durham 2016), “What Kind of Problem is Kripke’s Rule-Following Paradox?”
  37. David Harris (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2016), “Artificial Intelligence and Philosophical Logic”
  38. Dirk Hofland (BA, PPE, Durham 2016), “The School-Choice Trilemma”
  39. Imogen Maclaren (BA, philosophy, Durham 2016), “Reappraising The Harm in Hate Speech: A Dynamic Approach to Freedom of Speech”
  40. Toby Smith (BA, philosophy, Durham 2016), “Modelling Knowledge- and Belief-Based Moral Obligations: An Accessible Tool For Philosophical Analysis”
  41. Kim Tullar * (BA, natural sciences, Durham 2016), “Clarifying and Solving Newcomb’s Problem”
  42. Anna Wallace (BA, combined arts, Durham 2016), “Can There Be A Neuroscience of Grammaticalized Thought?”
  43. Kishen Vora (BA, philosophy, Durham 2015), “Can Robots Be Moral?”

* Winner of the Philosophy Department Dissertation Prize for dissertations with the highest mark out of all dissertations or out of all Single Honors philosophy students.

Other supervision

Maria Tolchenova Laidlaw scholar, philosophy (Durham)