Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences

Dr Ulf Hlobil (summer semester 2016/2017)

Dr Ulf Hlobil taught the Reason, Virtue, and Norms course at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences at FF UHK attended by students of the Master's degree in Philosophy. In the course, Dr. Hlobil provided his audience with various theories about practical reasoning and moral and social norms.

Dr Ulf Hlobil is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal. He acquired his doctorate degree from Pittsburgh University. His research mainly focuses on the topics of epistemology, logic, philosophy of mind and moral psychology. At the same time, he deals with the philosophy of language and philosophy of action. Dr Hlobil is also a permanent member of the team solving the 3-year project of excellence of UHK "Man as a Normative Creature" (together with Prof J. Peregrin and Dr L. Koreň).

As an editor and translator, he participated in the publication of the book G.E.M. Anscombe: Aufsätze (2014). His articles have been published among others in the prestigious philosophical magazines Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Review of Philosophy and Psychology and International Journal of Philosophical Studies.

 

Prof Paul Andrew Roth (winter semester 2017/2018)

 Prof Paul Roth teaches the Philosophy of History course for the Bachelor´s and Master’s students at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of FF UHK. The course deals with the exploration and solution of the debate about whether history is a science.

Paul A. Roth, Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is the author of Meaning and Method in Social Sciences: A Case for Methodological Plurals (1987) and editor (with Stephen Turner) of the Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences. He has written more than 70 articles on topics including the philosophy of W. V. O. Quin, the philosophy and sociology of science, and the philosophy of history. A special edition of essays devoted to his work of historical explanation (including Prof Roth's answers) will be published in December 2017 in the Towards a Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History edition: Around Paul A. Roth's Vision of Historical Sciences. Prof Roth was a co‑founder of the Philosophy of Social Science Roundtable and he is currently part of its management where he is involved in editing the institution´s annual conference anthology. He was a member of the original editorial board of The Journal of the Philosophy of History and also a member of the editorial boards of the journals History of the Human Sciences and Philosophy of the Social Sciences. Professor Roth is currently completing a book on analytical philosophy of history, which is expected to be published in 2018.

 

Prof Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer (summer semester 2018/2019)

 Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig where he has been teaching since 1992. His specializations are philosophy of the logic and language, philosophy of mathematics, German idealism, respectively Kant and Hegel.

He has been an editor of various philosophical magazines (Dialectik, Philosophische Rundschau, Philosophisches Jahrbuch), Robert Brandom's philosophy book "Pragmatics of Expression of Explicitness" (Benjamins 2005) and extensive commentaries on Hegel's phenomenology of mind.
Dialogue Note. 2 vol. Hamburg (Philos, Bibliothek, Meiner 2013) and Hegel's Science of Logic (2 vol., Philos., Bibliothek, Meiner 2019, 3^rd year 2020).

 

 

Dr. Gary Kemp (summer semester 2017/2018)

Dr Gary N. Kemp teaches Quine's Naturalism: Its distinctiveness, its origins course at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences, FF UHK.
Dr Kemp works at the University of Glasgow and he acquired his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is primarily interested in the history of analytical philosophy / philosophy of language (Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine and Davidson) and in aesthetics (Wollheim, Representation and Expression).

He has published a number of articles, books and textbooks in both areas. Significant publications include Quine versus Davidson (published by OUP, 2012) or Wollheim, Wittgenstein and Pictorial Representation (Routledge, 2016), which he published together with Gabriela Mras. This year, the second edition of his book What is this thing called Philosophy of Language? (Routledge, 2018) is published.

 

Dr. Casey Doyle (summer semester 2019/2020)

Dr. Doyle teaches Introduction to Philosophy of Mind to undergraduates and Self-Consciousness to graduate students. In the courses, Dr Doyle surveyed accounts of the self and self-knowledge across different philosophical traditions and historical periods. At UHK he worked on a research project entitled "Self-Knowledge and the Normativity of the Mental."

Dr. Doyle received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and was previously a Junior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford. He works at the intersections of epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of mind, focusing on self-knowledge and moral knowledge. Historical interests include Kant, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Murdoch, and Ryle. He has published in numerous general philosophy journals and co-edited the book New Essays in Epistemological Disjunctivism.

 

Assoc. prof. Ronald Loeffler (summer semester 2021/2022)

At the University of Hradec Králové, Ronald Loeffler taught an introductory course to ethics for undergraduate students and a seminar on recent developments in the literature on so-called mindreading for graduate students. The latter course focused mainly on how social stereotyping, biases, and enculturation affect our attributions of “inner thoughts” (beliefs, desires, intentions, motives, etc.) to others.

Prof. Loeffler is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Grand Valley State University, Michigan (USA). He earned his Ph.D. at Northwestern University in the early 2000s. His area of research is in the philosophy of language, mind, and psychology, and meta-ethics, with special interest in exploring relations between our abilities to reason and to discourse with others on the one hand, and to recognize others as competent speakers and reasoners on the other hand. Prof. Loeffler is the author of an introductory monograph to the philosophy of Robert Brandom (Polity Press, 2018) and the co-editor of a volume on the practical philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars (forthcoming with Routledge). Moreover, he authored articles that appeared among other in Synthese, Erkenntnis, the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and Philosophy Compass.

 

dr. Willem A. deVries (summer semester 2022/2023)

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire Willem A. deVries was a visiting professor at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Hradec Králové within the university's Mobility program. Previously, he also worked at Tufts University, Harvard University or Amherst College. He is the (co)author of professional publications, e.g. Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity; Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: A Reading of Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" or Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars.

You can read an interview with him here.

 

Dr. Kris Hill (winter and summer semester 2024/2025)

Kris earned her PhD in Anthrozoology from the University of Exeter, UK. Her doctoral research focused on discourses surrounding roaming cats (Felis catus) and cat-human relations. Anthrozoology is the study of human interactions with members of other animal species and draws upon scholarship and methodological approaches from a wide range of disciplines. Kris’ research is primarily qualitative, utilising discourse analysis, content analysis, and multispecies ethnographic approaches to explore more-than-human relationships and multispecies cultural co-creation. Her academic areas of interests include more-than-human families, griefwork, animal representations, animals and tourism, cat-human cultures, and more-than-human research ethics. Since 2019, Kris has authored or co-authored over 15 peer-reviewed papers or book chapters and presented her research to a range of audiences. Read more about Kris’ research interests and collaborative project here: https://academiccatlady.com/

In 2023 Kris founded the Cat Academic Think Tank (e-CATT), which is a cross-disciplinary group of academics whose interests are related to domestic cats or small wild cat species. Since 2021, Kris has served as a Communications Officer for the Society of Companion Animal Studies (SCAS), and in 2023 joined the board of trustees. Kris co-organises an annual online student conference in human-animal studies (Anthrozoology as International Practice, AIP) and is a co-host on The Anthrozoology Podcast. Kris is also an associate editor for the relaunched journal, Sloth: A Journal of Emerging Voices in Human-Animal Studies.

 

Dr. Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen (summer semester 2024/2025)

Professor Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen is teaching the course entitled Methodologism: A Pragmatist Account of Knowing and Meaning at the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences of FF UHK. This course is based on his forthcoming book Doing, Knowing and Getting it Right: Methodologism as Pragmatism (Cambridge University Press).

Kuukkanen has been a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oulu since 2018 and served as the Chair of the Department from 2020 to 2022. He is currently the Director of the Eudaimonia Institute of the Human Sciences at the University of Oulu. Previously, he has worked or resided as a research fellow at the universities of Durham, Leiden, Hull, and Cambridge.

Kuukkanen was the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Philosophy from 2017 to 2021. His monograph was chosen as the best in the philosophy of historiography in 2016 by the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography (ICHTH). His most recent edited book is Philosophy of History: Twenty-First-Century Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Kuukkanen has published papers on the philosophy of science, Thomas Kuhn, the philosophy of historiography, and philosophical questions about the history of science and conceptual history.”