Rate My Professor Heather Dyke

Professor Heather Dyke is Professor and Head of Programme in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago. She holds a BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Leeds, awarded in 1996. Dyke joined the University of Otago as a lecturer in 1998 and taught there for fifteen years. She subsequently held a position at the London School of Economics and Political Science before returning to Otago in 2019, where she now leads the Philosophy Programme. In September 2025, she delivered her Inaugural Professorial Lecture at the University of Otago, titled "The time of our lives."

Dyke specialises in metaphysics, in particular the philosophy of time. She defends the B-theory of time, according to which there is no distinction between past, present, and future, and no flow of time, independently of any perceiver. Her scholarly contributions include authored books such as Time (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Metaphysics and the Representational Fallacy (Routledge, 2008). She has edited A Companion to the Philosophy of Time (with Adrian Bardon, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), From Truth to Reality: New Essays in Logic and Metaphysics (Routledge, 2009), and Time and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). Key journal articles feature "Neutral Realism: A New Metaphysical Approach to Representation" (Philosophies, 2023), "Taking Tense Seriously Cannot Help the Growing Block" (Disputatio, 2023), "Weak Neo-Whorfianism and the Philosophy of Time" (Mind & Language, 2022), and "The Evolutionary Origins of Tensed Language and Belief" (Biology and Philosophy, 2011). Dyke has also published numerous book chapters, including "Naturalising the Philosophy of Time" (Routledge, 2024), and an encyclopedia entry, "Time, metaphysics of" (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005).