Nick Treanor

Reader

Philosophy
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Tel: 0131 651 3085
Email: nick.treanor@ed.ac.uk

Street: Room 8.09
City: 40 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9JX

Biography

Background

Nick Treanor is a Reader in Philosophy. Before coming to Edinburgh in 2012, he was the Newton Trust Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Churchill College. He works in metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophy of mind. He is originally from North America, where he did an undergraduate degree at Queen's University (Canada) and a PhD at Brown University (USA).

In 2017, Nick was awarded the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Student Experience.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

My main teaching areas at Edinburgh are epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics, but I love teaching outside my research specialization and taught courses in Aesthetics, Ancient, Early Modern, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Religion and Political Philosophy.

Since 2013, I have been running an annual trip to the Scottish Highlands for philosophy students; this year it was to Braemar, in the Cairngorms National Park.

Office Hours: These are now online, please look for me on Microsoft Teams or email for an appointment.

Postgraduate teaching

I have taught a variety of Master's courses at Edinburgh and elsewhere, and am currently involved in the launch of an interdisciplinary Master's programme focused on major infrastructure projects; I am co-teaching a course that brings insights from Philosophy to the management of these projects. More details here: https://tinyurl.com/LeadingMajorProgrammes

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Research

Research summary

Metaphysics, Epistemology, Philosophy of Mind and Language

Current research interests

It’s natural to think that how much we know changes over time. What could seem more obvious and unremarkable, for example, than the claim that I know more now than I did when I was 10 years old? Or that I know more about Edinburgh than I did before I moved here? Yet when we think carefully about what it is for knowledge to grow, about what an amount of knowledge is, and about what it is for one amount of knowledge to be more or less than another, deep and interesting problems surface. The issue is partly one for the philosophy of mind, given that the question concerns the nature of belief, and what a quantity of belief is. But it is equally a question for metaphysics and the philosophy of language, since it ultimately concerns the structure of what is true. My research focuses on understanding this quantitative dimension of knowledge and ignorance, its connection to central issues in mind, metaphysics and philosophy of language, and its ramifications for the foundations of epistemic normativity. The questions overlap since as Stalnaker has said "one can never fully disentangle questions about the nature of representation from questions about the nature of what is represented".