Keele University

Faculty Member, Philosophy

Reader in Philosophy

About

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.

My metaphilosophical views have led me to defend a particular position in the philosophy of action, according to which the task of a philosophy of action is to elucidate what we mean when we speak about actions and about events, not to address the problem of mental causation. I defend a pre-Davidsonian form of non-reductivism which is purely methodological and which denies the plausibility of identifying reasons with causes on conceptual grounds.

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”. I am desperate to finish this manuscript, but I never seem to get the time.

My most recent thoughts on the reasons/causes debate will appear in a paper entitled "From anti-causalism to causalism: an opinionate history of the reasons/causes debate". This will be part of a collection entitled "Reasons and causes: causalism and anti-causalism in the philosophy of action" that I am currently editing for Palgrave (forthcoming 2012).

My interest in metaphilosophy and the philosophy of action developed out of a reading of R. G. Collingwood whose "Essay on Philosophical Method" I regard to be a masterpiece in metaphilosophy.

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).

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