Richard Pettigrew

I’ve worked in quite a variety of areas over the past twenty years, from the philosophy of mathematics through the epistemology of uncertain beliefs to the theory of rational choice for those situations in which your values and preferences might change over time and the ethics of how we should treat others whose values and preferences have been formed in particular ways. In the philosophy of mathematics, I began working on foundations for arithmetic and analysis in weak set theories and then moved to the question of what mathematical statements mean and what ontology they commit us to. In the epistemology of uncertainty, I started looking at the norms for these beliefs that follow when we evaluate them by how accurately they represent the world, and more recently I’ve started to work on what such evaluations tell us about how we should inquire, gather evidence, direct our attention, and reason logically and conceptually. In decision theory and ethics, I have been interested in how we come to value what we value, when and how that might change, how we should decide when we know our values might change, and how the history of someone's values and the way they came to form them affects how we should treat them.

I supervise graduate students studying for their BPhil and DPhil. I give graduate seminars in philosophy. This year, I will give a Pro Seminar in metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language for the BPhil students during Michaelmas Term, and a graduate seminar on the epistemology of inquiry during Trinity Term.