University of the West of England
Faculty Member, Philosophy
University of Warwick, Philosophy
Associate Lecturer (U.W.E)
About
My primary research is located at the intersection of the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of action and agency, metaphysics, and psychology (philosophical division).
I address issues in the metaphysics of mind (reduction, emergence, supervenience) as well as questions concerning the causal (or non-causal) status of reasons, beliefs, and knowledge in relation to action.
The causal history of these ideas can be found in my early interest in the philosophy of free will and agency. I was not satisfied with compatibilist accounts of free will, and so argued against it — before discovering what I take to be equally weighty problems with many incompatibilist accounts. So I had discovered problems whether determinism is true or false, locally or globally (if such a distinction can or needs to be made).
The problem as I saw it was agency in general. There was not a satisfactory account of agency on the physicalist worldview, and this—it turned out—is closely tied up with the problems in the metaphysics of mind noted above. In short, realistic agency requires a certain kind of mental causation, and this in turn precludes certain positions in the metaphysics of mind.
Wholesale rejection of physicalism would be premature, however, if for no other reason than the fact that it is not always clear what the term properly denotes, and it is not clear what the alternatives would look like — although it is clear that a number of specific conceptions of physicalism will be ruled out by the requirements of mental causation as conceived above.
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