Research Strengths of Philosophy and Bioethics
Kim Little
Kim Little is a senior policy advisor in the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet. She has also worked as a solicitor at a major Australian law firm.
In Kim’s experience, philosophy is regarded by top employers as a rigorous, prestigious field of study. “For these employers, a good degree in philosophy is a sign that you are intellectually serious and have good transferable skills, for example, strong critical thinking.”
Kim credits the study of philosophy for much of her career success, and believes that everyone would benefit from studying it. She says “the most important skill that doing philosophy teaches you is how to produce disciplined, rigorous argument. There is no room for unclear writing, assertion or sloppy reasoning in philosophy. This skill has helped me enormously in my work as a lawyer and as a policy advisor.”
In her view, the benefits of a philosophical education also extend beyond skills, providing graduates with useful ways of thinking about the big questions, including political and social issues. She says “for people who want to grapple with difficult and complex issues, in any professional field, there is no better general preparation than philosophy.”
Australian philosophy has an international reputation and influence on the discipline that is disproportionate to the number of philosophers here. The School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash is among the top programmes in Australia and New Zealand, possessing particular research strengths in metaphysics, logic, applied ethics and moral philosophy, cognitive science, and the history of philosophy.
Research students in the School are invited to become members of an active and collegial community of inquiry. Every research student is entitled to an annual conference travel subsidy because students benefit from hearing new work and presenting their own work at such events. Most research students avail themselves of the opportunities for tutoring undergraduate subjects. Partly as a result of the School’s professional culture we have a record in placing our PhD graduates into teaching positions and postdoctoral fellowships that we believe is unrivaled among Australian philosophy programmes.
As well as applicants who intend to pursue an academic career path, the Centre for Human Bioethics in particular, welcomes inquiries from professionals who are coming to grips with ethical issues in their work. The best work in applied ethics combines clear and rigorous philosophical thinking with an intimate knowledge of the specific contexts in which moral decisions of a certain sort must be made.
Research projects funded by competitive grants include:
Conscious States in Conscious Creatures: A Philosophical Framework for the Science of Consciousness
There is currently an intensive research effort in cognitive neuroscience dedicated to uncovering the neural basis of consciousness. Two fundamentally different approaches can be discerned: one approach is focused on particular conscious states such as perceiving a face or a house, and the other approach on whether the creature is at all conscious or not. There is good reason to think that on their own these approaches are not able to reveal the neural basis of consciousness. Methodological and conceptual considerations show that state consciousness and creature consciousness must instead be tackled together. This project aims to provide the philosophical framework necessary for developing such novel, unified research approaches.
Neglected Problems of Time: Metaphysical and Topological Problems Arising
In his Confessions, St. Augustine wrote: What then is time? If no one asks me, I know, if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I do not know.
We’re offering to help St. Augustine out: the aim of our project is to answer a series of philosophical questions about what time is, that arise in the context of discussion of contemporary physics, especially in connection with quantum gravity. These philosophical questions about time have been unduly neglected by philosophers, even though they are the most important and most interesting philosophical questions to ask about the nature of time.
For more information about the research focus and strengths in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies.
