I was educated at John Ruskin Grammar School in Surrey, at the LSE, where I did the BSc(Econ), and at the University of California Berkeley where I was a Fulbright Scholar. I am now Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of York where I was, until September 2016, Head of the Department of Philosophy. I am a fellow of the British Academy, and of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
My first academic posts were at the Universities of Otago, New Zealand and the University of Sydney. Later I was at Flinders, Adelaide. I moved to Nottingham in 2000, and was Dean of Arts there from 2004-7, and then Director of Research in Humanities from 2011-2013.
I've held visiting positions at the LSE, St Andrews, University of Maryland, Bristol, Cambridge, Oxford and L’Ecole Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. In 2021 I was a visiting professor of philosophy at the University of Turin.
I am the Editor-in-Chief of Mind and Language, an editorial consultant for the British Journal of Aesthetics, and on the editorial boards of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and Storyworlds.
I was a member of the Philosophy sub-panels for both REF2014 and REF2021. I have been on reviews of philosophy programmes in the Czech Republic, Italy and Romania.
I work mostly on the arts and cognition. At the moment I am particularly interested in irony ancient Greek drama, and how current work in pragmatics can shed light on this. See my paper on Medea here. I am also writing about what vision science can tell us about the aesthetics of visual art. I hope that a book, Signs of Agency, will appear with Oxford in the next couple of years; predictably, the project is going more slowly than I would like. I also write about film, empathy and the emotions, the philosophy of poetry, and about fiction and knowledge. See more on my publications here.
