Current Teaching

Michaelmas 2025:

• PPR207 Moral Philosophy
• PPR450 What is Philosophy? (1 week)

My Role

My main role is teaching, researching, and writing philosophy.

I am Discipline Lead for Philosophy in the School of Global Affairs.

I am Lancaster's Academic Lead to the AHRC and to its Northern Hub.

Career Details

I did an undergraduate degree in philosophy at York (1996), the BPhil at Queen's College Oxford (2000), and a PhD in political philosophy at York (2004). Before starting my current job at Lancaster in 2007, I taught at the universities of York, Leeds, and Glasgow.

Research Overview

I am a philosopher interested in the self; in good and bad lives it might lead (aka welfare, well-being); in its reflexive powers and practices; in the roles of experience, reflection, and institutions in its development and success; and in how to do philosophy so as to advance our understanding of these issues.

These interests have lead me to think, write, and teach about capitalism and anarchism; utopias, dialogues, and autobiographies; pleasure, self-discovery, and self-realization; self-knowledge, self-interpretation, and self-command; the lives and experiences of monks, soldiers, hermits, and solo travellers; and the transformative effects of work and war.

My recent work has been philosophy of and through autobiography, and as part of it I have published articles in journals including Inquiry, Ratio, The Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and a book, Good Lives (Oxford University Press 2021).

I am currently writing a book about the relations between philosophies of the self and philosophies of welfare, making use of speculative fiction about alien and artificial selves.

PhD Supervision Interests

The good life/well-being/welfare. The self. Life in time. The philosophy of war. The philosophy of work and the workplace. Literature and/as philosophy.