Rebecca Roache

Last updated
Rebecca Roache
Born
Pembrokeshire, South Wales
Nationality British
Alma mater University of Cambridge
Era Contemporary philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic [ citation needed ]
Institutions Royal Holloway University of London
Doctoral advisor D. H. Mellor, Jane Heal
Main interests
Philosophy of language
Notable ideas
Theory of swearing

Rebecca Roache is a British philosopher and Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London, known for her work on the philosophy of language, practical ethics and philosophy of mind. [1] She is particularly noted for her work on swearing, which has featured in various media, such as the BBC. [2]

Contents

Biography

Roache received her BA in philosophy at the University of Leeds in 1996, and her MA in philosophy at the same university in 1997, where she worked among others closely with Robin Le Poidevin. She then took an MPhil (1999) and a PhD (2002) at St John's College, Cambridge, with Jane Heal and D.H. Mellor as dissertation advisers. After completing her PhD, she worked in various projects at the University of Oxford, including a research fellowship at the Future of Humanity Institute. [3] She is currently Senior Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. [4] From 2013 to 2018, she was Associate Editor for the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Notable philosophical views

Roache's theory of swearing [5] examines why swearwords (including non-slurs and non-religious swearwords) are so powerful. She proposes that swearwords have a unique linguistic role, coupled to a unique emotional role. According to Roache, swearing obtains its power because of speaker inferences: when someone swears, she knows her audience will find it offensive, and the swearer knows the audience knows she knows that the audience will find it offensive, and so on, a process termed offence escalation. Speakers and listeners who belong to the same cultural and linguistic community will likely find similar things offensive, which explains why some expressions (disrespecting social hierarchy, sexual taboos, mention of bodily fluids etc.) tend to cross-culturally recur as swearwords. [6]

Roache is also noted for a blog post where she said she unfriended people who voted for the Conservatives at the 2015 General Election. She argued that “Openly supporting a political party “that – in the name of austerity – withdraws support from the poor, the sick, the foreign, and the unemployed while rewarding those in society who are least in need of reward” was "as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views". [7]

In addition to her work in the philosophy of language, Roache has published on a variety of topics in practical ethics and metaphysics, such as which biomedical modifications to humans could be used to fight climate change. [8]

She has an active Twitter feed. [9] On 25 July 2018, she was listed among the top 100 philosophers on Twitter. [10]

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christina Hoff Sommers</span> American author and philosopher (born 1950)

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Onora O'Neill</span> British philosopher & college principal

Onora Sylvia O'Neill, Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve is a British philosopher and a crossbench member of the House of Lords.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Applied philosophy</span> Branch of philosophy

Applied philosophy is a branch of philosophy that studies philosophical problems of practical concern. The topic covers a broad spectrum of issues in environment, medicine, science, engineering, policy, law, politics, economics and education. The term was popularised in 1982 by the founding of the Society for Applied Philosophy by Brenda Almond, and its subsequent journal publication Journal of Applied Philosophy edited by Elizabeth Brake. Methods of applied philosophy are similar to other philosophical methods including questioning, dialectic, critical discussion, rational argument, systematic presentation, thought experiments and logical argumentation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Midgley</span> English philosopher (1919–2018)

Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man (1978), when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philippa Foot</span> English philosopher (1920–2010)

Philippa Ruth Foot was an English philosopher and one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her work was inspired by Aristotelian ethics. Along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, she is credited with inventing the trolley problem. She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tibor Machan</span> Hungarian-American philosopher (1939–2016)

Tibor Richard Machan was a Hungarian-American philosopher. A professor emeritus in the department of philosophy at Auburn University, Machan held the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California until 31 December 2014.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">R. B. Braithwaite</span> English philosopher and ethicist (1900–1990)

Richard Bevan Braithwaite was an English philosopher who specialized in the philosophy of science, ethics, and the philosophy of religion.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Julian Savulescu</span> Australian philosopher and bioethicist

Julian Savulescu is an Australian philosopher and bioethicist. He is Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor in Medical Ethics and Director of the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore. He is also the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, and was previously the Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford, Director of the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, and co-director of the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities. He is a visiting professorial fellow in Biomedical Ethics at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia, and distinguished visiting professor in Law at Melbourne University since 2017. He directs the Biomedical Ethics Research Group and is a member of the Centre for Ethics of Pediatric Genomics in Australia. He is a former editor and current board member of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Women have made significant contributions to philosophy throughout the history of the discipline. Ancient examples of female philosophers include Maitreyi, Gargi Vachaknavi, Hipparchia of Maroneia and Arete of Cyrene. Some women philosophers were accepted during the medieval and modern eras, but none became part of the Western canon until the 20th and 21st century, when some sources indicate that Simone Weil, Susanne Langer, G.E.M. Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir entered the canon.

Alison Wylie is a Canadian philosopher of archaeology. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia and holds a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of the Social and Historical Sciences.

Karen J. Warren was an author, scholar, and former professor and chair of philosophy at Macalester College.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Crary</span> American philosopher

Alice Crary is an American philosopher who currently holds the positions of University Distinguished Professor at the Graduate Faculty, The New School for Social Research in New York City and Visiting Fellow at Regent's Park College, University of Oxford, U.K..

Peggy Jo DesAutels is an American academic and professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Dayton. Her research focuses on moral psychology, feminist philosophy, feminist ethics, ethical theory, philosophy of mind, bioethics, medical ethics and cognitive science. She has received multiple awards and recognitions including Distinguished Woman in Philosophy for 2014 by the Eastern Division of Society for Women in Philosophy, and the 2017 Philip L. Quinn Prize by the American Philosophical Association.

Chris Cuomo is the Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program, the Institute for African-American Studies, and the Institute for Native American Studies. Before moving to the University of Georgia, Cuomo was the Obed J. Wilson Professor of Ethics at the University of Cincinnati.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tatjana Višak</span> German philosopher (born 1974)

Tatjana Višak, often credited as Tatjana Visak, is a German philosopher specialising in ethics and political philosophy who is currently based in the Department of Philosophy and Business Ethics at the University of Mannheim. She is the author of the monographs Killing Happy Animals and Capacity for Welfare Across Species, and the editor, with the political theorist Robert Garner, of The Ethics of Killing Animals.

Siobhan O'Sullivan was an Australian political scientist and political theorist. She was an associate professor in the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. Her research focused, among other things, on animal welfare policy and the welfare state. She was the author of Animals, Equality and Democracy and a coauthor of Getting Welfare to Work and Buying and Selling the Poor. She co-edited Contracting-out Welfare Services and The Political Turn in Animal Ethics. She was the founding host of the regular animal studies podcast Knowing Animals, as well as a founder of the Australasian Animal Studies Association.

Clare Palmer is a British philosopher, theologian and scholar of environmental and religious studies. She is known for her work on environmental and animal ethics. She was appointed as a professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University in 2010. She had previously held academic appointments at the Universities of Greenwich, Stirling, and Lancaster in the United Kingdom, and Washington University in St. Louis in the United States, among others.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeff Sebo</span> American philosopher

Jeffrey Raymond Sebo is an American philosopher. He is clinical associate professor of environmental studies, director of the animal studies MA program, and affiliated professor of bioethics, medical ethics, and philosophy at New York University. In 2022, he published his first sole-authored book, Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves. This was followed by The Moral Circle: Who Matters, What Matters, and Why in 2025.

Catia Faria is a Portuguese moral philosopher and activist for animal rights and feminism. She is assistant professor in Applied Ethics at the Complutense University of Madrid, and is a board member of the UPF-Centre for Animal Ethics. Faria specialises in normative and applied ethics, especially focusing on how they apply to the moral consideration of non-human animals. In 2022, she published her first book, Animal Ethics in the Wild: Wild Animal Suffering and Intervention in Nature.

Emma Byrne is a contemporary British writer and scientist, working in the fields of swearing, artificial intelligence and robotics.

References

  1. Departmental website
  2. BBC article on swearing, accessed 27 February 2017.
  3. Biography of Rebecca Roache, accessed 25 July 2018.
  4. Departmental website
  5. Roache, Rebecca. 2018. Naughty words. Aeon Magazine.
  6. Roache, Rebecca. 2018. Podcast on swearing. Philosophy Bites Podcast.
  7. Independent article, retrieved 10 May 2015.
  8. Bioengineer humans to tackle climate change, say philosophers, The Guardian, 14 March 2012, accessed 25 July 2018.
  9. Rebecca Roache, Twitter feed.
  10. Philosophers on Twitter, accessed 25 July 2018.