Graham Nerlich

Short Biography

Graham Nerlich's research has been mainly on issues in the overlap of ontology of space and time with philosophy of science and relativity theory. In particular, he has long defended a realist view of space and spacetime in his books The Shape of Space and What Spacetime Explains (both Cambridge, 1994) and numerous papers. More recently he has published in Analysis, Erkenntnis, and contributed an article in The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics (2003). His contribution ‘Why Spacetime is not a Hidden Cause’ to the International Conference on the Ontology of Spacetime (Montreal, 2008) is forthcoming. He was educated at the University of Adelaide and Oxford University. He has taught at the Universities of Leicester, Sydney and Adelaide and held visiting appointments at Johns Hopkins, Cambridge and Oxford Universities and the University of California, San Diego. His philosophical interests are rather general. He wrote an ethics book Values and Valuing (Oxford, 1989). He held chairs in the Universities of Sydney and in Adelaide until his retirement. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.