About Me
I am a fellow of the British Academy, and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. I teach Philosophy at the University of York and my Erdős number is 6. I teach and research on the arts and cognition. I have finished (perhaps nearly finished) a book on fiction and knowledge, and started a new one: Aesthetics: A Naturalistic Theory. I am executive editor of Mind & Language.
New Papers
My most recent paper, Pictures and their surfaces is now out in a volume of essays on the aesthetics of painting. See a copy of this here 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 big research project is a book, Signs of Agency, under contract with Oxford University Press. My book Imagining and Knowing: the Cognitive Power of Fiction, will appear with Oxford University Press shortly.
Talks
I regularly speak at academic and public events. In 2019 I am giving a number of public lectures, colloquium talks, conference and workshop papers.
Books
I have published books dealing with fiction, film, imagination, and the arts. My most recent book is Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, published by Oxford University Press.