Alex Silk

I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. I joined the philosophy department in 2013 after completing my PhD at the University of Michigan. I specialize in philosophy of language, ethics, and metaethics.

My research is driven by a deep commitment to mutually informed philosophical and linguistic inquiry. My 2016 book, Discourse Contextualism (OUP) – developed under grants from the British Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and Leverhulme Trust – examines how speakers use context-sensitive language in coordinating their attitudes about how the discourse should evolve. The work on normative discourse ("Normative Language in Context," Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Vol. 12) was awarded the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics.

My Context Pronouns project integrates the previous treatment of context-sensitive expressions in a wider investigation of how linguistic form and interpretation depend on context. I am examining the prospects for a linguistic theory that posits representations of context in the structure and meaning of natural language. My 2021 book, Semantics with Assignment Variables (CUP), develops the formal framework and applies it to diverse phenomena with modal expressions, quantifiers, anaphora, relativization, and questions.

I also have projects on Nietzsche (e.g. Nietzschean Constructivism, the Genealogy), vagueness (e.g. Vagueness as Contextual Indecision (Discourse Contextualism ch6)), comparative vagueness), predication (e.g. in noun phrases, verb phrases, clauses (Semantics with Assignment Variables chs. 6-7)), and philosophy of law (e.g. contextualism, expressivism, vagueness).

During 2025–2026 I will be taking up a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship for my project Conditional Predicates in Context (see here).