Research interests and PhD supervision
Metaphysics
Philosophical Logic
Mediaeval Philosophy
Philosophy of Religion
Prof Hughes' philosophical interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophical logic, the philosophy of religion, and mediaeval philosophy. (In a way, though, his philosophical interests are all in metaphysics, inasmuch as the problems that occupy him in philosophical logic or philosophy of religion or mediaeval philosophy are problems in metaphysics. In fact, he tends to think everyone’s philosophical interests are all in metaphysics, because metaphysics just is philosophy, but that’s another story…)
In metaphysics, he has worked a good bit on problems having to do in one way or another with identity - for example, on what good criteria of identity for material objects and for events might be, on the identity or otherwise of things existing in different possible worlds or different times, on the identity and persistence of (human) persons, on the possibility of intermittent existence (can anything existing after a thing has gone out of existence be identical to that thing?), and so on. He is also interested in a set of problems concerning time, truth, and necessity, and in particular in the question of whether there is a sense of “necessary” in which only necessary propositions are knowable, or in which only necessary truths are true.
In philosophy of religion, he has done work on natural theology and natural atheology, and on various questions concerning divine attributes, for example: Could God be absolutely simple? Could He be three different persons in one nature? Could He know all the truths there are to know about who or what doesn’t exist?) His work in mediaeval philosophy has primarily centred on Aquinas’s metaphysics - especially, his (hylomorphic) accounts of the metaphysical constitution of material substances and of human beings - and on his philosophical theology, but he also has interests in Augustine (especially, on freedom and necessity), Anselm (especially, on the Trinity), and Ockham (especially, on the truth and knowability of propositions about the open future).