Nick Treanor

Reader

  • Philosophy
  • School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Contact details

Address

Street

Room 8.09

City
40 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code
EH8 9JX

Biography

Background

I am a Reader in Philosophy at Edinburgh. Previously, I was the Newton Trust Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. I'm originally from North America, where I did an undergraduate degree at Queen's University (Canada) and a PhD at Brown University (USA).

In 2017, I was awarded the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Student Experience.

 

Undergraduate teaching

I've taught UG courses across a wide range of areas including epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, aesthetics, ancient, early modern, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion and political philosophy.

Since 2013, I have been running an annual trip to the Scottish Highlands for philosophy students; most recently it was to Braemar, in the Cairngorms National Park.

Postgraduate teaching

I usually teach the MSc courses Theory of Knowledge and Social Epistemology, and have taught a variety of other courses in epistemology, ethics, metaphysics and philosophy of language. I was also involved in the launch of an interdisciplinary Master's programme (with the Schools of Engineering and Business) focused on major infrastructure projects; as part of that I co-taught a course on Philosophy and Engineering.

 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Areas of interest for supervision

I'd welcome inquiries from potential PhD students as well as students interested in a Masters by Research. Inquiries from students interested in philosophical issues in engineering are especially welcome.

Current PhD students supervised

  • Matt Wragg (Epistemology of Construction Product Certification)
  • Maureen Price (Musical Expressiveness and Imagination)

Past PhD students supervised

  • Mara Neijzen, The Emotional Nature of Intellectual Virtues and Their Affective Extension
  • Christian Michel, Predictive Embodied Concepts: An Exploration of Higher Cognition within the Predictive Processing Paradigm
  • Hadeel Naeem, Is a Subpersonal Epistemology Possible? Re-evaluation of Cognitive Integration for Extended Cognition (only for viva stage)
  • Alex Whalen, Ampliative Understanding
  • Joost Ziff, The Metaphysics of Knowing and the Norm
  • Kevin Wallbridge, Counterfactual Epistemology: In Defence of Sensitivity
  • Michael Hannon, “A Practical Explication of Knowledge” (At Cambridge)

Research summary

Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind and Language, Ethics and Epistemology of Engineering

Current research interests

Most of my time these days is spent thinking about ethical and epistemological issues in engineering, especially civil and construction engineering. There has been very little work in philosophy of engineering in the English-speaking world, but I think the reasons for this are only sociological - the social boundaries between philosophy and engineering are not very porous and very few people are familiar with, let alone have serious training in, both disciplines. There are, however, many interesting issues for philosophers within engineering, and these run across almost the full range of our discipline - epistemology, ethics, philosophy of language and metaphysics, and aesthetics. As part of this work, I am currently supervising an AHRC-funded PhD student, Matthew Wragg, on a project on 'The Epistemology of Construction Product Certification'.

Past research interests

Most of my research has focused on what we might think of as the quantitative dimension of knowledge. To see the issue, notice that it’s natural to think that how much one knows changes over time. What could seem more obvious, for example, than the claim that I know more now than I did when I was 10 years old? Or that I know more about Edinburgh than I did before I moved here back in 2012? Yet when we think carefully about what it is for knowledge to grow, about what an amount of knowledge is, and about what it is for one amount of knowledge to be more or less than another, deep and interesting problems arise. The issue is partly one for the philosophy of mind, given that the question concerns the nature of belief, and what a quantity of belief is. But it is equally a question for metaphysics and the philosophy of language, since it ultimately concerns the structure of what is true (what structure does it have such that one can believe more or less of it?). I've focused on understanding this quantitative dimension of knowledge and ignorance, its connection to central issues in mind, metaphysics and philosophy of language, and its ramifications for the foundations of epistemic normativity. The questions overlap since as Stalnaker has said "one can never fully disentangle questions about the nature of representation from questions about the nature of what is represented". If you're interested in taking a look at this work, please see the 'Publications' section below.

Knowledge exchange

I work closely with senior industry leaders in construction, civil, structural, fire-safety and forensic engineering, with the shared goal of better understanding the ethical and epistemic dimensions of engineering. Our shared goal is both theoretical -- to better understand important aspects of thought and action -- and practical -- to improve engineering, including how it is conceived, taught, governed, and practiced.

 

If you're interested in taking a look at my work on the quantitative dimension of knowledge, I'd suggest these papers (feel free to contact me if you're interested but don't have an institutional subscription that allows you to view the papers):

The Measure of Knowledge: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0068.2011.00854.x

Trivial Truths and the Aim of Inquiry: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1933-1592.2012.00612.x

Truth and Epistemic Value: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejop.12345

The Proper Work of the Intellect: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-american-philosophical-association/article/abs/proper-work-of-the-intellect/3547C6B62C761247D7E351DC6012B4F2

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