Britt Harrison
- Position: Visiting Research Fellow
- Areas of expertise: Wittgenstein; Philosophy of Film and Art; Epistemology; Metaphilosophy
- Email: B.Harrison@leeds.ac.uk
- Website: Phil Papers | IMDB
Profile
I am a Visiting Research Fellow at the Univerity of Leeds working on the relation between our normative and our animal natures. My first PhD, The Epistemology of Know-How draws on the work of Wittgenstein to argue that attempts to reduce knowing how to propositional knowledge commit a category mistake and fuel a questionable metaphysics-first epistemology. My second PhD, Cinematic Humanism: Cinematic, Dramatic, and Humanistic Value in Fiction Films offers an expanded appreciation of the kinds of value that films can have, to provide new resources with which to understand and move beyond the cognitivist/non-cognitivist debate in the philosophy of art. Prior to this, my MA in Philosophy was gained at Birkbeck College, University of London, with an thesis entitled, Are Religious Beliefs Wittgensteinian Hinges?’; the answer being – yes.
Alongside my academic research and scholarship, I have had a career in the film and television industry and currently also work as a screenwriter and script consultant.
Research interests
All my philosophical investigations revolve around humanistic attempts to understand and articulate a number interrelated pairings: know-how/know-that; rule/proposition; normative/animal; and philosophy/metaphilosophy. These interests fuel my commitment to an open-ended range of methods I characterise as philosophy without theory. These methods include ways of doing philosophy that resist scientistic, cognitive and/or reductive theorising, or alternative ‘Theory’-orientated approaches. My published work in the philosophy of film without theory includes a collected volume in 2023 and a journal Special Issue on the topic in Aesthetic Investigations, 2020, as well as two international conferences on the subject. Details can be found here: https://philosophyoffilmwithouttheory.com
<h4>Research projects</h4> <p>Some research projects I'm currently working on, or have worked on, will be listed below. Our list of all <a href="https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/dir/research-projects">research projects</a> allows you to view and search the full list of projects in the faculty.</p>Qualifications
- Doctor of Philosophy (University of York)
- Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hertfordshire)
- MA Philosophy (Birkbeck College, University of London