Sophie Botros

I am honorary Research Associate at the School of Advanced Study, Institute of Philosophy, University of London UK. Previously I was a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, Birkbeck College. I became interested in philosophy through Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. My concern with moral philosophy and metaethics culminated in a book Hume, Reason and Morality: A Legacy of Contradiction (Routledge, 2006), Since then my interests have broadened yet again to include metaphysics, particularly temporal theory. In my latest book Truth, Time and History: A Philosophical Inquiry (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), I propose a solution to the impasse which current presentists, who are almost exclusively realists, face in trying to explain how, if only present things exist, some past tensed statements can be true. My solution brings the Idealism of the philosophers of history, R.G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, for whom historical truth is a function of historical interpretation, not of something actually existing in the past, to bear upon one key presentist theory, the realist but highly interesting ersatz presentism.