John Hyman (born 6 March 1960) is a British philosopher. He was Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Oxford before being appointed as Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College London in September 2018.[1]
Hyman received his BA, BPhil and DPhil at the University of Oxford, and was elected to a Fellowship at The Queen's College, Oxford in 1988. He edited the British Journal of Aesthetics from 2008 to 2018. He held a Getty Scholarship at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, in 2001–2002, a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002–2003, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2010–2012. He was Professeur Invité in the UFR de Philosophie at the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) in 2014–2015.
His research is in the fields of epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, aesthetics and philosophy of art, and Wittgenstein.[2] He is known for his analysis of knowledge as an ability, and for his criticism of the idea that neuroscience can explain the nature of art.
In 2018, Hyman began a five-year research project entitled Roots of Responsibility, supported by an ERC Advanced Grant, which "advance traditional philosophical debates about responsibility and free will by exploring the network of human capacities responsibility involves and the social, institutional and interpersonal contexts in which questions about responsibility arise, cutting across traditional boundaries between metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of law."[3]