Duncan Pritchard

Biography

Duncan Pritchard (PhD, St. Andrews) joined the Department in July 2007 as the new Chair in Epistemology. Before coming to Edinburgh, he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling. In 2007 he was awarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize. In 2011 he was elected to a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. In 2013 he delivered the annual Soochow Lectures in Philosophy in Taiwan, which were published by Princeton University Press as Epistemic Angst: Radical Scepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing. In 2013 these lectures were the topic of the annual Cologne Summer School in Philosophy. Duncan is the Director of Edinburgh's Eidyn research centre. He is currently leading several externally funded Eidyn research projects, including two major collaborative and interdisciplinary Templeton-funded projects and also the Edinburgh wing of a Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie European Training Network.

Research Interest

Duncan's research is mainly in epistemology with particular focus on the following issues: the problem of scepticism, the epistemic externalism/internalism distinction; the rationality of religious belief; testimony; the relationship between epistemic and content externalism; virtue epistemology; epistemic value; modal epistemology; the history of scepticism; and epistemological contextualism. His principal monographs are Epistemic Luck (Oxford UP, hardback 2005, paperback 2007), The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations (co-authored with Adrian Haddock and Alan Millar, Oxford UP, hardback 2010, paperback 2012), Epistemological Disjunctivism (Oxford UP, hardback 2012, paperback 2014), and Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing (Princeton UP, 2015).  Duncan is also the author of Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), What is this Thing Called Knowledge? (Routledge, 1st ed. 2006, 2nd ed. 2009), Epistemology A-Z(Edinburgh UP/Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, with M. Blaauw), and editor or co-editor of more than a dozen volumes and journal special issues (for more details about Duncan's publication record, see below). He is the editor-in-chief of Oxford Bibliographies: Philosophy and (with Diego Machuca) International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, and he is the series editor of three book series: New Waves in Philosophy, Palgrave Innovations in Philosophy (both with Vincent Hendricks) and Brill Studies in Skepticism(with Diego Machuca). He also administers the weblog, Epistemic Value. Aside from epistemology, Duncan is also interested in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and language, the philosophy of religion, and, increasingly, ethics and value theory. Duncan is part of the Department of Philosophy's Epistemology research cluster, and is Director of the new Eidyn research centre. He is also currently leading a several research projects as part of this centre, including a major AHRC-funded project (c. £510K) on 'Extended Knowledge', and three Templeton-funded projects, Philosophy, Science and Religion Online (c. £1.5M), 'Intellectual Humility MOOC' (c. £400K), and 'Virtue Epistemology, Epistemic Dependence, and Epistemic Humility' (c. £100K). He also leads the Edinburgh component of the European-wide DIAPHORA research network (European Commission Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie ITN European Training Network grant, c. €3.7M).  Click here for his Google Scholar Profile. If you want to know what will eventually cause his demise, click here. Duncan contributes to the University of Edinburgh's new MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) in Introduction to Philosophy and Philosophy and the Sciences. He's also one of the people behind the new Eidyn-led online MSc in Epistemology, Ethics and Mind. To listen to a BPPA talk he gave on getting published, click here. To see a recent lecture he gave in Bonn on radical scepticism, click here. To see his 'research in a nutshell' video, click here. Oddly, for someone who hasn't published much at the formal end of philosophy, Duncan has an ErdÅ‘s number (7).