The Roots of Responsibility ERC project team is pleased to announce the appointment of three new members: Rachel Achs, Claire Hogg, and Michael Thorne.
Rachel Achs
Claire Hogg
Michael Thorne
Rachel Achs will be an ERC Research Fellow on the project, which she will hold as an Extraordinary Junior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, University of Oxford, for two years starting October 2021. She writes:
I recently defended my PhD in Philosophy at Harvard University. Prior to my doctoral work, I earned a BA in Philosophy from Yale University, and an MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge. My research is about emotions and the norms that govern them. I focus particularly on the affective attitudes involved in our practices of holding responsible, such as anger, guilt, and blame. I'm delighted to join the Roots of Responsibility team, and very much looking forward to working with the wonderful philosophers on the project.
Claire Hogg will be an ERC Research Fellow on the project, which she will hold at UCL, for two years starting September 2021. She writes:
I recently completed my PhD in Law at King’s College London, under a Dickson Poon Scholarship. Prior to this, I obtained a BA and a BPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Medical Ethics and Law from King’s College London. My main areas of interest are criminal law and legal theory, medical law (most specifically mental health and capacity law), and moral philosophy. In particular, my research focuses on mental disorder as a factor relevant to culpability determinations within the criminal law. I am very excited to join the project as an ERC Research Fellow, where I will be conducting research into the compatibility of objective standards of criminal culpability with an integrated approach to mental condition-based exculpation.
Michael Thorne will be a PhD candidate at the Department of Philosophy, UCL, starting September 2019, with the Graduate Research Scholarship jointly funded by RoR and the Department. He writes:
I am interested in Wittgenstein, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and moral philosophy. My thesis explores genealogical scepticism—scepticism arising from considerations about the origins of our beliefs—through the lens of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. I previously completed the BPhil at the University of Oxford and I am currently a policy adviser in the civil service. I am thrilled to be joining such a fantastic group of philosophers on the RoR project.
RoR’s Director and Principal Investigator, John Hyman, comments:
Our advertisement for the post-docs this year once again attracted a large number of excellent applications from lawyers and philosophers, and in the event, we have appointed one person in each discipline. Claire Hogg is joining us from KCL, where her PhD dissertation was on mental condition-based exculpation in the criminal law. Rachel is coming from Harvard University, where her research focused on the nature of blame, the grounds of blameworthiness, and the reasons we have to engage in practices of blaming. Claire will be working at UCL, while Rachel’s fellowship will be based at The Queen’s College, Oxford. We are delighted that we have also been able to fund a Doctoral Studentship jointly with the UCL Department of Philosophy, which has been awarded to Michael Thorne, who completed a BPhil at the University of Oxford. Michael will be writing about scepticism, and has a particular interest in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.
These three new members have been appointed after a long selection process. We received a large number of applications, almost all with strong research profiles and interesting research proposals. We thank all those who applied for the fellowships, and hope that many of them will be involved in the RoR project in one way or another.