Welcome to Philosophy at Southampton

The University of Southampton is one of nineteen members of the Russell Group - institutions which have distinguished themselves as research-led universities of international quality, and which are committed to the provision of teaching in a research-led environment. This means that undergraduates are taught by staff who are working at the cutting edge of their particular discipline in terms of research and publication.

Philosophy is part of the School of Humanities. We offer a single honours undergraduate programme and a variety of combined honours programmes with subjects in the School of Humanities and elsewhere in the University. We also offer two MA programmes and the research degrees, M.Phil and Ph.D.

Philosophy at Southampton was ranked =7th for student satisfaction in the results of the 2009 National Student Survey. With fifty-nine UK departments in the overall rankings, this excellent result reflects our commitment to teaching and learning and the strength of our staff-student relations.

Southampton has also been highly rated for two of its main areas of research focus in the 2009 edition of the influential Philosophical Gourmet Report, which gives a peer review-based ranking of postgraduate programmes in Philosophy in North America, the UK and Australasia, ‘primarily on the basis of the quality of faculty’. For our research in Nineteenth Century Continental Philosophy, we are ranked =1st in the UK and top-ten internationally. For our research in the Philosophy of Art, we are ranked =1st in the UK.

These results confirm the findings of the Higher Education Funding Councils’ 2008 Research Assessment Exercise, which deemed 100% of our research activity to be ‘internationally recognised’. 40% of that activity was further evaluated as either ‘internationally excellent in terms of originality, significance and rigour’ or ‘world-leading’.

These successes follow on from the most recent governmental Quality Assurance Agency Subject Review, which awarded us the maximum score of 24 out of 24, praising Philosophy at Southampton for ‘its broad, flexible, coherent and well-structured undergraduate curriculum’, as well as the ‘accessibility and approachability of all academic staff’.

You can listen to and download interviews with some of our philosophers on their research interests: