Profile

Career

Departmental roles

• Head of Department of Philosophy
• Computing Officer
• Physics/Philosophy and Maths/Philosophy Executive Committees

University roles

• University Council
• Chair of e-Accessibility Forum
• Strategic Information Projects Implementation Group
• Research Information Network

Research

Overview

Research interests

Cognition (Consciousness, Self-knowledge, Perception, Memory); Idealism in the Early Modern period

Current projects

I am in the early stages of writing a book about consciousness. My view is that perception is the paradigm case of consciousness, but that perceiving does not involve a mental state. So the phenomenal character of consciousness in perception is not determined by phenomenal or representational properties of some mental state but the properties of the 'external' objects of perception. But in imaginings and dreamings there are no such objects, so I deny that these are conscious experiences: rather they are a special kind of thought about possible conscious experiences. What about illusions and hallucinations? Well, I an unconvinced that phenomena philosophers allude to really exist in the forms which might create problems for my view.

I am still writing quite a lot about Berkeley. I have been working on Alciphron for a while – inspired by teaching it to 3rd year undergraduates – exploring the dialectic, the argument for Divine Language and the ‘non-cognitivism’ in a series of papers. I am also writing on his account of universal knowledge for a major historical project on universals sponsored by the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.

I am interested in some more minor British philosophers of the early modern period, especially Arthur Collier (Clavis Universalis, 1713), Richard Burthogge (Organum Vetus et Novum, 1678) and Herbert of Cherbury (De Veritate, 1624). Not only do these philosophers provide useful historical context to the canonical figures, but also they have intriguing ideas which have been all but washed away in the sea of history.

Stemming in part from various curious passages I have come across in early modern philosophical texts, passages which made me realize that mirrors can be and have been conceived of rather differently from how we think of them now, I am planning an inter-disciplinary research project on 'Mirrors: Materials, Metaphors and Models' with colleagues from English, History of Art, Archaeology and Psychology. If you think you could contribute, let me know!

Supervision

Current Ph.D. Students: Ro Smith (Transcendental Arguments), Louise Moody (Naïve Realism), Tae Kim (Perceptual Content)

Recent Ph.D. Students: Richard Flockemann (Self-knowledge and the a priori), Michael Wilby (Intentionality and shared cognition), Han-Kyul Kim (Locke on substance)

Publications

Selected publications

• 'Perceiving, Imagining and Dreaming', forthcoming
• 'Catching Berkeley's Shadow', forthcoming
• 'Berkeley on Action and Blind Agents', forthcoming
• Stoneham, T. 2009: 'Time and Truth: The Presentism-Eternalism Debate'. Philosophy, 201-18
• Stoneham, T. 2008: 'A Neglected Account of Perception'. Dialectica, 307-22
• Stoneham, T. 2006: 'Berkeley's "esse is percipi" and Collier's "simple" argument'. History of Philosophy Quarterly, pp.211-24
• Efird, D. & Stoneham, T. 2006: 'Combinatorialism and the Possibility of Nothing'. Australasian Journal of Philosophy
• Efird, D. & Stoneham, T. 2005: 'The Subtraction Argument for Metaphysical Nihilism'. Journal of Philosophy, 102, pp. 303-25
• Stoneham, T. 2004: 'Self-Knowledge'. Handbook of Epistemology, eds. I.Niiniluoto, J.Wolenski, M.Sintonen, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, pp. 647-72
• Stoneham, T. 2003: 'On Equivocation'. Philosophy, 78, pp. 515-9
• Stoneham, T. 2003: 'Temporal Externalism'. Philosophical Papers, 32, pp. 97-107
• Stoneham, T. 2002: Berkeley’s World: An Examination of the Three Dialogues. Oxford: OUP

Full publications list

• List of publications

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Early Modern Philosophy
• Intermediate Logic
• Epistemology
• Twin Earth
• Atheism and Scepticism

Postgraduate

• MA module: Metaphysics and Epistemology (PDF) [BROKEN LINK]

External activities

Editorial duties

• Associate Editor of Mind
• News Editor of the Berkeley Newsletter