My work centres on the ideas of action, perception, and objectivity. I am especially interested in how these ideas relate to themes in the history of analytic philosophy, and in German Idealism.

I am currently working mainly on the idea of self-consciousness, and on how this idea serves to unite my three central concerns. At the heart of my work is the idea of the first personal character of philosophy itself. Perhaps the most famous sentence in Western philosophy is “I think, therefore I am”. This sentence uses the first person. And this is no accident. In the use of “I”, the essence of philosophy is contained. Philosophy seeks self-understanding, or understanding “from within”, as opposed to understanding “from outside”. It asks: “What am I?” as opposed to “What is it?” Or at least, this is what it used to do. For this is an insight that contemporary philosophy has largely lost.

I am currently writing a book that explores and develops this idea. The book falls into three parts. The first part explains what it is for philosophy to seek self-understanding, and argues that much of contemporary Anglophone philosophy does not seek understanding of this form. It shows how many of the prevailing orthodoxies of this branch of philosophy can be traced to this fact, and how, if this branch of philosophy were to seek self-understanding, its landscape would be significantly altered. The second part further articulates the conception of self-understanding introduced in the first part, and describes a troubling consequence of this conception—that self-understanding is in an important sense empty, in that it does not distinguish the one who has it from anyone or anything else. (This is the consequence that Kant spoke of when he said that the "I think" is not “a representation distinguishing a particular object, but rather a form of representation in general”, and Anscombe spoke of when she said that "I" is not a referring expression.) Amongst other things, this consequence seems to put in doubt the very idea of empirical objectivity, for it seems to prevent the subject from understanding himself as perceiving and interacting with (as he would put it) “objects outside of me”. The third part explains the need to resolve this difficulty, and argues that resolving it requires overcoming the appearance of a gulf between self-understanding and understanding from outside. It argues for a conception of these two forms of understanding as two sides or two aspects of a single form, one that is essentially such as to unite different subjects with each other. In so doing, the book draws on ideas from the history of analytic philosophy and from German Idealism, with a view to shedding light on both of these traditions.

I teach undergraduate courses on Perception, Action, Aesthetics, and Objectivity. I have taught postgraduate courses on Action and Intention, and on Sensation.

I am especially interested in supervising graduate students with interests in the following areas: action, perception, self-consciousness, German Idealism, and the philosophies of Anscombe and Wittgenstein.