- Normative ethics and meta-ethics: moral sentimentalism, response-dependence accounts of moral terms, constructivism in ethics, equality, impartiality, recognition, naturalizing morality, the normative implications of normality, ethics of intersubjectivity, perception and emotion analogy, forgiveness, wrongdoing, responding to wrongdoing
- Philosophical aesthetics: Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, Goodman’s Languages of Art, Arthur Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace – the ontology of art, art and aesthetic merit, contemporary debates in aesthetics, institutional theory of art (Pierre Bourdieu etc.)
- History of Philosophy: Thomas Hobbes and the Scottish Enlightenment, Earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith etc.; French Enlightenment (Rousseau), German Enlightenment (Kant and context), German phenomenology (Husserl)
Possible topics for Master's dissertations:
Response dependent accounts of the meanings of moral terms, moral sentimentalism, evolutionary ethics, perception-emotion analogy, normative constraints of forgiveness, responding to wrongdoing
Aesthetic use of language and pictorial signs, aesthetic merit, ontology of the artwork
Normative ethics of the Scottish Enlightenment (social contract theories, moral sense theories, ethics and cultural evolution, naturalizing ethics, Hume’s ethics, Smith’s ethics), Rousseau’s political theory and their foundations in motivational psychology, Kant’s ethics and political thought etc.
Find out more abut Christel's research here.