Thomas Bullemore

Thomas Bullemore is a DPhil candidate and Roche Scholar at New College. Having completed his LLB he lectured in legal philosophy at the University of Chile. He also practiced and argued cases before Chilean courts and read for an MPhil in Law here in Oxford.

His doctoral research explores questions about what is constitutive of the normative domain, and how our epistemic access and our ways of representing it in thought and language are responsible to that constitution.

In particular, he examines how a metasemantic theory for normative predicates—a theory specifying what makes it the case that certain intentional states and token uses of normative expressions have stable semantic contents—can meet the general integration challenge for a realist metaethics: providing a simultaneously acceptable metaphysics and epistemology for mind-independent, causally inert properties picked out by individual idiolects.

He argues that a particular brand of semantic externalism can furnish the requisite explanatory bridge by cashing out robust realism about ethical normativity in terms of reference magnetism and belief in terms of reliable access (thus ruling out mainstream expressivist and conceptual-role-semantics attempts at traversing the avowed chasm). His dissertation further seeks to target related domains where this model can help shed better light on perennial philosophical debates, such as the positivism-antipositivism debate in law.

Thomas welcomes an exchange with anyone interested in social ontology, metaethical realism, and more specifically in the semantics of normative language and the nature, reason-giving, and knowledge of normative facts.

His supervisor is David Enoch and he previously worked with Timothy Endicott.

Photograph by Tim Cavadini