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 "The agency in art" is forthcoming in a volume of essays on the work of Kendall Walton edited by Sonia Sedivy, to be published by Routledge. For a near final version see here.
Learning from Fiction
Our Leverhulme-funded project on "learning from fiction" started in September 2018. Go to the Research page for more detail.
A reader of my most recent book
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.