Dr Kathleen Murphy-Hollies

• PhD ‘Confabulating Well: The Ethics of Confabulation’, at University of Birmingham (2024)
• MA Philosophy, University of Birmingham (2016)
• BA Philosophy University of Birmingham (2015)

I started my PhD at the University of Birmingham in September 2019. I worked with Lisa Bortolotti, Iain Law and Quassim Cassam (Warwick). My PhD topic considered how self-concepts, self-narratives and explanations of our own behaviour (but particularly, confabulations) affect our ability to embody moral virtues. During my PhD, I paused by studies to work full time as a Teaching Fellow from January 2022 – June 2023, during which time I taught a lot of modules spanning ethics, epistemology and political philosophy. I visited Tilburg University October-December 2023. I completed my PhD in March 2024 and then started working full-time on project EPIC as a research fellow. Alongside research, I run the EPIC reading group, organise events, and am guest-editing a special issue on epistemic injustice.

I am part of The Philosophy Garden, a public philosophy project led by Lisa Bortolotti (https://sites.google.com/view/the-philosophy-garden/home). I help produce video resources for the general public and teachers to use, I use the resources myself in outreach teaching for summer school programmes, and finally I organise and participate in public philosophy events with the resources. The project focused on philosophy of conspiracy theories at first but is broadening out.

I am co-lead of an interdisciplinary research project ‘‘Film, Storytelling and Conspiracies”, which seeks to investigate links between conspiracy ideation, digital storytelling, and historical theological roots of conspiracies.

I am also Book Review Editor for the journal Philosophical Psychology.

• LM Philosophy and Mental Health
• LM Philosophy and Ethics of Mental Health and Wellbeing

Current research themes of my work:

• Epistemic injustice and self-knowledge
• Delusion and metaphor
• Conspiracy theories, rationality and emotion
• Confabulation