The Philosophy Department congratulates the latest PhDs to defend their dissertations.
David Rattray defended “Getting Purposes in Mind,” supervised by Denis Walsh in October 2025.
Denis Walsh describes David Rattray’s work as a highly innovative dissertation that “draws out some of the implications of agent-centred evolutionary biology for traditional issues in the philosophy of mind. On the view that David develops, representation and reason are both constitutive of action; an action represents its success conditions, and the reason for an action is the fact that it conduces to success.”
Kristen Beard defended “How to Say Things Without Words: Social Dynamics and Inferential Communication, supervised by Cheryl Misak and Nate Charlow in October 2025.
Cheryl Misak points out that “Kristen Beard’s thesis presents an important analysis of the way social context influences how we make inferences about each others’ behavior and speech acts. She argues that there are a wide range of social norms and social expectations (much more than just the Gricean implicature maxims) that one must know about in order to communicate fluently in everyday verbal and nonverbal ways. She also mounts a powerful argument that the extent to which communication and its impairments relies on social norm awareness has been overlooked.”
Liang Zhou Koh defended “Knowing Together,” supervised by Jennifer Nagel in December 2025.
Jennifer Nagel comments on how Liang Zhou Koh’s thesis “tackles the notoriously difficult question of what is involved in openly sharing a state of knowledge with another person. On the classical account of common knowledge, a group of people know something together if each of them knows it, and each of them knows that all the others know, and so on to infinity. Liang Zhou’s thesis raises fresh challenges for that classical account and lays the groundwork for a psychologically realistic alternative, guided by recent research on social cognition and conversational interaction. External examiner Harvey Lederman (NYU) described the result as ‘outstanding’ and ‘game changing.’”
Greg Horne defended “Realizing the World: Experience and Physics,” supervised by William Seager in February 2026.
William Seager describes Horne’s work on Russellian Monism: “Drawing in a remarkable and original way on some of Newton’s ideas about his third law, Greg shows how the apparent fundamental difference between the conscious and the non-conscious is a kind of illusion fostered by our own exceptionally complex introspective experiences. In the end, Greg draws an attractive picture of how Russellian Monism can fund a metaphysics of the world that gives consciousness a place at its core.”
Eamon Darnell defended “Second Order Axiomatic Theories of Truth,” supervised by Philip Kremer in April 2026.
Congratulations to all five on their successful work!
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