Dr Christopher Earley
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Background
Christopher Earley is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Philosophy. He gained his PhD from the University of Warwick in 2023 and was a British Society of Aesthetics Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Liverpool from 2023 to 2025. His work primarily focuses on the social epistemology of art and the aesthetics of inquiry. He is also interested in issues in the philosophy of history and theories of meaning in life. He is currently co-editor of the journal Debates in Aesthetics.
Qualifications
2019-2023 - PhD, Philosophy, University of Warwick
2017-2018 - MA Philosophy, King’s College London
2014-2016 - MA Fine Art, The Slade School of Art (University College London)
2011-2014 - BA English Literature, University College London
Undergraduate teaching
In 2025-26, I will be co-convening Aesthetics (PHIL10117) with Dr Stacie Friend
Research summary
My research covers topics in aesthetics, epistemology, philosophy of history, and ethics. At Edinburgh, I am primarily focused on my Leverhulme-funded project on the social epistemology of art. The core thesis of this project is that achieving knowledge and understanding through art is often a highly collaborative activity, involving the input of many different parties involved in the creation, appreciation, and mediation of art. I contend that grasping this radically alters our standard philosophical accounts of what makes art cognitively valuable, how this impacts our assessment of art's artistic value, and how we understand the ethics and aesthetics of inquiry in the arts.
Alongside this work, I am also pursuing research into the idea of finding and losing your sense of your place in history. Roughly, I contend that we cannot articulate this idea simply by looking at how historians think about the past, nor simply by looking at the way we experience time passing. Rather, I argue that we gain or lose our sense of our place in history by figuring out how the interactions between our understanding of the past and our sense of the future lend meaning to our lives. I propose, further, that aesthetic artefacts and experiences have a particularly important role in shaping this sense of history.