Qualifications

MA, PhD (University of Hamburg)

Academic background

I have been at Christ Church since 1997. From 1997 to 1998 I also taught at Birkbeck College, London, and from 1998 to 2005 at LMH, Oxford. Since 2005 I’ve been teaching at the University of Reading, where now I am an Associate Professor in Philosophy.

Undergraduate teaching

For Prelims and Mods I teach General Philosophy; Introduction to Logic; Mill: Utilitarianism; and the Leibniz–Clarke Correspondence. For the Philosophy FHS I teach History of Philosophy from Descartes to Kant (Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant); Kant; Post-Kantian Philosophy (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Sartre); Frege, Russell, Early Wittgenstein; Later Wittgenstein; Aesthetic & the Philosophy of Criticism; Knowledge & Reality; Philosophy of Mind; Philosophy of Logic & Language; Ethics; and Philosophy of Religion.

Research interests

My research focuses on Wittgenstein, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind and Schopenhauer.

Featured publications

• ‘The Coded-Message Model of Literature’, in: R. Allen & M. Turvey (eds), Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, London: Routledge, 2001.
• Ed. Wittgenstein and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001.
• ‘Why Juliet is the Sun’, in: M. Siebel & M. Textor (eds), Semantik & Ontologie, Frankfurt/Main: Ontos Verlag, 2004.
Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly Bottle, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.
• ‘Moore’s Paradox and First Person Authority’, in: Grazer Philosophische Studien 71, 2006.
• ‘The Tightrope Walker’ [Wittgenstein on religious belief], in: Ratio, Dec 2007.
• ‘Analytic Truths and Grammatical Propositions’, in: H. J. Glock & J. Hyman (eds), Wittgenstein and Analytic Philosophy, Oxford: OUP, 2009.
• ‘Hempel’s Paradox, Law-likeness, and Causal Relations’, in: Philosophical Investigations, 2009.
• Wittgenstein lesen, Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 2009.
• ‘A Tale of Two Problems: Wittgenstein’s Discussion of Aspect Perception’, in: J. Cottingham & P.M.S. Hacker (eds), Mind, Method, and Morality: Essays in Honour of Anthony Kenny, Oxford: OUP, 2010.
• Ed.: Philosophy of Literature, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
• 'Wittgenstein', in: T. O'Connor & C. Sandis (eds), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.
• ‘Schopenhauer’s Influence on Wittgenstein’, in B. Vandenabeele (ed.), A Companion to Schopenhauer, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.
• ‘Conjecture, Proof, and Sense, in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Mathematics’, in: C. Jäger & W. Löffler (eds), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Frankfurt: Ontos, 2012.
• ‘Music and Metaphor’, in British Journal of Aesthetics, 53, 2013.
• ‘Can I have your pain?’ in Philosophical Investigations 36:3, 2013.
• ‘Wittgenstein on Rules in Language and Mathematics’, in: N. Venturinha (ed.), The Textual Genesis of Wittgenstein’s ‘Philosophical Investigations’, London: Routledge, 2013.
• (with John Preston:) ‘The Neuroscientific Case for a Representative Theory of Perception’, in: T.P. Racine & K.L. Slaney (eds), A Wittgensteinian Perspective on the Use of Conceptual Analysis in Psychology, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
• ‘Art, Value, and Function’, in: The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, no.46, 2013.
• ‘Wittgenstein sur l’explication de l’action’, in : R. Clot-Goudard (ed.), L’explication de l’action : Analyses contemporaines, Grenobles : Recherches sur la philosophie et le langage, 2014.
• ‘Mathematical Propositions as Rules of Grammar’, in: Grazer Philosophische Studien 89 (2014).
• ‘Mathematics and Forms of Life’, in Nordic Wittgenstein Review, Oct 2015.
• ‘Intuition, Decision, Compulsion’, in : Action, Decision-Making and Forms of Life, ed.: J. Padilla Gálvez, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016.
• ‘Wittgenstein on Aesthetics’, in: H.-J. Glock & J. Hyman (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
• ‘Wittgenstein on Grammar and Grammatical Statements’, in: H.-J. Glock & J. Hyman (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017.
• ‘Reasons and First-Person Authority’, in: Intentionality and Action, ed.: J. Padilla Gálvez & M. Gaffal, Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017.
• ‘“Too ridiculous for words”: Wittgenstein on scientific aesthetics’, in: J. Beale & I. Kidd (eds), Wittgenstein and Scientism, London: Routledge, 2017.