Katherine Hawley


Katherine Jane Hawley is a British philosopher specialising in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of physics. Hawley is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of How Things Persist, Trust: a Very Short Introduction, and How To Be Trustworthy. Hawley was elected a Fellow of Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016, elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020, and she has been the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship.

Life and career

Hawley was born in Stoke-on-Trent, England. She did her undergraduate degree in physics and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and lived in France for a short while afterwards. She then went on to receive her MPhil and PhD in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Peter Lipton. Prior to becoming a Lecturer at the University of St Andrews in 1999, Hawley had been Henry Sidgwick Research Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, where she had taught a variety of subjects, inter alia, political philosophy, critical thinking, epistemology, formal logic, and metaphysics. She currently lives in Anstruther in Fife. She served as an editorial chair of The Philosophical Quarterly, in addition to being a deputy and an associate editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Work

In How Things Persist, Hawley defends a 'stage-theory' of persistence that combines the four-dimensionalism of perdurance theory with an endurantist account of predication. Heather Dyke praised the book for offering a new formulation of endurance theory as “the claim that ordinary objects are such that they exist at more than one time and statements about what parts they have must be made relative to some time or other”. According to Dyke, this characterisation captures the fundamental notion that ordinary objects exist at more than one time without being temporally extended in addition to simplifying cross-comparisons with the perdurance theory, which accepts but rejects.
Recently, Hawley's research interests shifted from persistence, parthood and identity to trustworthiness and competence in ethics and epistemology. She cites the metametaphysical turn in analytic philosophy coupled with her deflationary intuitions about the possibility of methodology of metaphysics as a reason for moving away from metaphysics to ethics and epistemology. In How To Be Trustworthy, Hawley explores what it is to be trustworthy or untrustworthy, articulating a notion of 'trustworthiness' as avoiding unfulfilled commitments.

Selected works

Authored books