Philosophy researcher wins prestigious US fellowship

School of Philosophy researcher Professor Daniel Nolan has been awarded a prestigious fellowship for advanced study at the National Humanities Center (NHC) in the United States.

Professor Nolan will spend the 2015/2016 American academic year at the Center in North Carolina, joining around 40 visiting academics in various humanities fields.

“I'm very pleased to have the opportunity, and I'm excited about being able to work at the NHC, since it brings together a really interesting group of people working across the humanities,” says Nolan.

“Since it's a US institution, the bulk of the people who are awarded fellowships are also from the US, so it's a special honour to be awarded one as an Australian-based academic.”          

Professor Nolan is the third academic and first philosopher from ANU to work at the NH since the fellowship program began in 1978. Previous ANU visiting fellows were ancient historian Graeme Clarke (1991) and English academic Ralph Elliott (1980).

Professor Nolan’s research focus while at NHC will be on analysing “theoretical virtues”, looking at important aspects of theories.

“My main focus will be on features of theories, besides consistency with the data, that make them good theories: features such as simplicity, offering good explanations, being fertile for generating new lines of inquiry, and so on,” he says.

“I want to say a bit about a number of these "theoretical virtues", discussing some of the accounts of why they are valuable for theorists, and seeing to what extent the same sorts of things are valuable about theories across different sorts of inquiries, from the natural sciences to the social sciences to the humanities. 

“I also want to examine the question of what extent these sorts of features give us reason to accept or believe the theories, and to what extent they are desirable for other kinds of reasons (e.g. ease of use or likely popularity of theories).”

Professor Nolan works in a wide range of philosophical areas, including philosophical logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, meta-ethics and even some work in epistemology, philosophy of mind, normative ethics, social and political philosophy, and the history of philosophy.