Research Focus Areas

Current areas of expertise in the department:

• Prof Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem works in philosophy of science (scientific realism and the structure of scientific theories); formal logic (mathematical model theory); aspects of knowledge representation in philosophy of Artificial Intelligence; epistemology (the problem of perception); aspects of free will and personal identity in contemporary metaphysics; and aspects of personal identity and global justice in Anglo-American political philosophy. 
• Prof Ernst Wolff works on issues in social & political philosophy (Ricoeur); phenomenology and hermeneutics; philosophy of technology (the technicity of action); the history of 20th century philosophy; and philosophy of religion.
• Prof Ulrike Kistner works in political philosophy; metapsychology and theory of psychoanalysis; aspects of aesthetic theory; aspects of the question 'What is Critique?'; and aspects of the work of Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben.
• Prof Benda Hofmeyr works in contemporary continental philosophy (Levinas and Foucault); philosophical anthropology; philosophical ethics; philosophy of artistic and cultural production; aspects of social and political philosophy; and aspects of phenomenology and metaphysics.
• Ms Mpho Tshivhase works in social and political philosophy; ethics; aspects of personal identity in philosophy of mind; aspects of personhood in African philosophy; hermeneutics (Gadamer); and aspects of the meaning of life (love and death).
• Mr Stephan Greyling works in ethics; political philosophy (Ricoeur); and philosophy of technology (Latour).
• Our extra-ordinary professor, Prof Reingard Nethersole, works in continental philosophy (Agamben, Deleuze, Derrida, Lacou-Labarthe, Nancy, Ranciere, Stiegler, Heidegger); hermeneutics and critical theory (Adorno, Horkheimer, Habermas); and on aspects of the works of Foucault and Nietzsche.