Politics, International Relations & Philosophy

I was awarded a PhD from the University of Essex in 1995 for a thesis on the philosophy of Kant and Hegel and the relationship between transcendental and objective idealism.  I am interested in epistemological and metaphysical questions in both the Anglo-American and European traditions. I am a member of the Forum for European Philosophy of the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre and the coordinator of the Keele Forum for Philosophical Research.

My current research interests are in metaphilosophy and the philosophy of action. The metaphilosophical issue with which I am concerned is that of the relationship between philosophy and science and whether philosophy is an autonomous discipline with its own method and subject matter.  These meta-philosophical views have led me to defend a particular position in the philosophy of action, according to which the question “how is mental causation possible?” should be construed not in metaphysical terms, as asking “how can the mind fit in the natural world?” but in conceptual terms as asking: “what are actions?” and “under what conditions is an autonomous science of the mind possible?”  These arguments have been developed in several journal articles that have appeared in Metaphilosophy, The European Journal of Philosophy, Ratio, Inquiry and in a manuscript provisionally entitled “From a Conceptual Point of View”. 

My interest in metaphilosophy and the philosophy of action developed out of a reading of R. G. Collingwood.  I am the joint editor of Collingwood’s An Essay on Philosophical Method (Oxford, 2005) and the author of Collingwood and the Metaphysics of Experience (Routledge, 2002).  I would be very happy to supervise MPhil and PhD  theses in the philosophy of action and in any area of Collingwood studies.

Full Publication List and  Work in progress

• Moral Philosophy
• Epistemology and Metaphysics I
• Epistemology and Metaphysics II
• Great Philosophers of the Twentieth Century
• Philosophy Dissertation (module convenor)
• Metaphilosophy (MRes Humanities- Philosophy) module convenor