Research-led teaching

We are proud to offer research-led teaching in philosophy at the University of Sheffield. All of our teaching staff in the Sheffield Philosophy Department are active researchers, and our research informs our teaching.

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Watch: Making sense of pleasure

In this short talk, the Department of Philosophy's Luca Barlassina shares his research on affective states such as emotions, moods, pleasures, and pains.

Here are some examples of the current research of some of our staff, and how it contributes to their teaching.

Global environmental justice

Megan Blomfield's research concerns global justice and the environment. Her book on this topic, Global Justice, Natural Resources, and Climate Change, was published by Oxford University Press in 2019. In the book, Megan asks what the world would look like if natural resources were shared fairly and then explains how this can help us to better understand the kind of problem that climate change presents and what a just response to it would look like. In addressing these questions, she touches on issues including the demands of global egalitarianism, claims of sovereignty, territorial rights, and the relationship between climate change and histories of colonial resource exploitation.

This research feeds directly into Megan’s second year module on Environmental Justice. Students on this module learn about theoretical frameworks that can be used to identify environmental injustices, and environmental racism. They then examine various global environmental challenges in light of these frameworks, considering topics such as indigenous rights and settler colonialism, rights of nature, whether global conservation must be decolonized, climate justice, the politics of geoengineering, and the place of hope and environmental activism. They also complete an assessment in which they apply concepts of environmental justice to an environmental issue that they care about.

Human cognition, sensation, and emotion

Luca Barlassina’s research lies at the intersection between philosophy and cognitive science. Basically, he is interested in how the mind works. He spends quite a lot of time thinking about how philosophy can help to clarify and integrate empirical results from psychology and neuroscience, and how these results can contribute to solving philosophical puzzles about the mind. Sometimes he designs and runs psychological experiments himself.

The main focus of Luca’s research concerns questions about affective states such as emotions, moods, pleasures, and pains. What is an emotion? Why do orgasms feel good and pains feel bad? Is morality based on empathy? How can we know what someone else is feeling? How can we know what we are feeling? What is the relation between affective states and cognition? Are emotions necessarily embodied?

This research feeds into one of Luca's undergraduate modules, Pleasure, Pain, and Emotions (third year). In this module students explore the nature of different affective states (pain, sensory pleasure, basic emotions, social emotions, etc.) and their role in our mental lives. Students grapple with questions such as: What is pain? Can happiness be reduced to pleasure? How one can be afraid of flying even if one knows that flying is not dangerous? How did disgust evolve? Is the immorality of a psychopath due to an emotional deficit?

Personal identity, and death, and the soul

Eric Olson is one of the world’s leading researchers on the metaphysics of personal identity. What sort of thing is a person? What does it take for a person to continue existing from one time to another? What makes it the case, for instance, that you are the child at the bottom left in a certain primary-school class photo, rather than one of the others? Are we entirely material things, or do we have some sort of soul?

Eric advocates the view known as ‘animalism’, which says that we are biological organisms. This means that personal identity is really animal identity. He has defended this view in two books, The Human Animal and What Are We? He is also the author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on personal identity. He defends the more general view that we are wholly material things in Do We Have a Soul?.

You can find out more about Eric's philosophical views, and how got into philosophy, in an interview for 3:16am. (There are many more interviews, in both video and print, on his website.)

This research forms part of the content of his module Bodies and Souls. Descartes thought all mental activity took place in an immaterial substance, so that what we call a human being is really two things: a thinking soul and an unthinking body. Aristotle thought that every living thing, whether conscious or not, was a compound of matter and form, and he called this form a ‘soul’. These views are currently undergoing a revival. The module examines them.

The metaphysics of personal identity also plays a role in Eric’s first-year module Death. It deals with questions such as: What is death? What happens to us when we die? Could there be some sort of afterlife? What makes it bad to die--or is it bad at all? Would it be better if we didn’t die, but were immortal? Here is a popular article of Eric’s on some of this material.

Religion, free will, and virtue

Ryan Byerly's research tends to focus on questions about free will and virtue, especially as these intersect with themes in religion. For example, he has published one book and more than ten journal articles addressing a wide gamut of traditional puzzles regarding free will that arise because of belief in the kind of God in view in Judaism, Christianity or Islam.These puzzles include whether human beings can have free will if God has perfect foreknowledge of what they will do, whether human freedom provides a solution to the problem of evil facing belief in God, and whether God could have free will if God is also necessarily morally good.

Ryan's research on these topics directly informs his teaching of the level three module Free Will and Religion, where students work systematically through these topics for themselves, gaining an appreciation for the diversity of views that have been defended regarding the topics and an understanding of the intricacies of ongoing philosophical debates concerning them.

Ryan has also published research on a variety of moral, intellectual, and collective virtues. In many cases, his research on these topics is again directed toward questions intersecting with themes in religion. For example, his most recent monograph, Putting Others First, engages in an interdisciplinary evaluation of a character trait called "others-centeredness" that he argues is advocated for in certain texts of the New Testament.

Ryan's research on moral, intellectual, and collective character traits directly informs his teaching of the second year module Religion and the Good Life, where students investigate a variety of philosophical views regarding the relationship between religions and a well-lived life, including questions about the value--or lack thereof--of character traits distinctively lauded or repudiated in a variety of religious traditions.

Students investigate, for example, Buddhist views about mindfulness, Christian conceptions of humility, Confucian conceptions of filial piety, and Jewish perspectives on protesting God. The module takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, introducing students to relevant research in Philosophy, Psychology, and Religious Studies.

Beyond these two areas of focus, Ryan also takes an interest in the broader array of topics that have tended to dominate the field of philosophy of religion. He has written, for example, about arguments for God's existence, questions about the rationality of religious faith, and questions about the afterlife, most recently co-editing a volume of philosophical essays called Paradise Understood that focuses specifically on heaven. These traditionally-dominant topics in the field tend to be a place of focus in the first year module Philosophy of Religion.

Further reading

Department of Philosophy