Niall Connolly

Niall Connolly is a University Teacher in Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, affiliated with the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities. He previously held adjunct and part-time roles at Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin.

His research spans metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language, with secondary interests in philosophy of science, early modern philosophy, ethics, and metaethics. He has published extensively on fictionalism, bare particulars, and the ontology of non-existent entities, often bridging analytic philosophy with interdisciplinary questions.

Connolly’s recent publications analyze semantics of indexicals in answering machine paradoxes (2018), bare particular theory (2015), and ontological coherence in metaphysics. He critiques ontological permissiveness and explores the implications of fictional resistance in moral epistemology.

• 2022: Fictional Characters and Characterisations (Pacific Philosophical Quarterly)
• 2018: Answering Machine Paradox (Dialectica)
• 2015: Defense of Bare Particulars (Philosophical Studies)

His teaching portfolio at Sheffield includes courses on Self and Society, Fiction and Truth, and Metaphysics, while past roles involved modules on philosophy of science and mind.

• Wray Prize for best undergraduate thesis in Philosophy (TCD, 1997)
• John Isaac Beare Prize for top philosophy grades (twice awarded, TCD)