Tuesday, 30 December 2025

PhD projects

In chapter seven of my book I deliberately described some threads left open. I think some of these would make for interesting doctoral projects. Get in touch if you're looking for a project/supervisor and think one of these sounds like you!

  • Looking at the connection between agency and individuality. Do agents have to be individuals? In what sense? Is it possible to have multilevel agents?
  • Plasmid individuality and the identification of parts versus parasites.
  • alternating generations in plants and how to make sense of them
  • Species concepts in plants, in particular how the nuances of plant individuality complicate plant species concepts
  • Biodiversity measures in conservation ecology, and how the nuances of individuality complicate them
  • Looking at artificial and extraterrestrial life: Is life necessarily composed of individuals, as I argue?
  • Cooperation problems across substrates: looking for common rules and lessons between biological and social instances of individuation: what are the mechanisms, what are the constraints. Some game theory would help you with this one!
  • HeLa cell lineages and how they challenge our ideas about biological ontology

I'm also up for anything to do with environmental conservation metaphysics!

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