About Me
I was educated at the LSE and at the University of California, Berkeley. I teach Philosophy at the University of York and my Erdős number is 6. I teach and research on the arts and cognition. I am executive editor of Mind & Language. I am a fellow of the British Academy, and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
New Papers
With Xuanqi Zhu I recently published "Aesthetic sense and social cognition: a story from the Early Stone Age", in Synthese.
My paper "Pictures and their surfaces" is now out in a volume of essays on the aesthetics of painting edited by Jerome Peletier and Alberto Voltolini, The Pleasure of Pictures, Routledge. See a copy of this here.
Learning from Fiction
Our Leverhulme-funded project on "learning from fiction" started in September 2018. Go to the Research page for more detail.
Stefan Banach and Otton Nikodym discuss the Lebesgue integral, Planty Gardens, Kraków, 1916
Research
My current main project is a book, Signs of Agency, under contract with Oxford University Press. I am completing an essay, "The agency in art", for a volume of essays in honour of Kendal Walton. With Jon Robson (University of Nottingham) I am writing an article for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the arts and cognition.
Talks
All my talks for 2020 have been cancelled or delayed by covid-19. As things are rescheduled information will go on this page.
Books
I have published books dealing with fiction, film, imagination, narrative and the arts. My most recent book is Imagining and Knowing: The Shape of Fiction, published by Oxford University Press.