Dr Nicholas Waghorn

Background

I came up to Oxford to undertake my undergraduate degree in 2000, before completing a PhD at the University of Reading. I was then Director of Studies and Fellow in Philosophy at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, until its closure in 2022. I have a Research Fellowship in Philosophy at Blackfriars Hall. I’ve been Lecturer in Philosophy at St. Peter’s since 2022, and have recently spent a year as Lecturer in Philosophy at Exeter College.

Teaching

I’ve taught a number of different papers at Oxford over the years, including General Philosophy, Knowledge and Reality, Philosophy of Religion, Post-Kantian Philosophy (Hegel), and Early Modern Philosophy (Berkeley and Leibniz). At St. Peter’s the main papers I teach are in Ancient Philosophy: Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (both in translation).

Research

I have interests across most aspects of the discipline, but my main research focus has been in the areas of metaphysics, epistemology, metaphilosophy, and value theory.

To be still more specific, I am interested in whether and how we can justify some of our most fundamental philosophical practices, such as a commitment to being rational, or to using some of our basic concepts, like ‘thing’ (and the related ‘everything’ and ‘nothing’), ‘reality’, and ‘existence’. If we can’t justify such practices, I believe it’s important to consider what that means for how we do philosophy (or if philosophy can be done at all).

I also seek to bring any results from the above research to bear on certain questions of existential significance, such as whether life can have any ultimate meaning and what the nature of death might be.

Selected publications

‘Death Prevents Our Lives From Being Meaningful’, TheoLogica, vol. 8, No. 1, 2024.

‘Why Be Rational?’, Acta Analytica, vol. 38, Issue 2, pgs. 335-353, June 2023.

‘Metaphilosophical considerations on the question of life’s meaning’, Metaphilosophy, vol. 53, Issue 4, pgs. 457-474, July 2022

Nothingness and the Meaning of Life: Philosophical Approaches to Ultimate Meaning through Nothing and Reflexivity, Bloomsbury: 2014.