Teaching

I regularly teach undergraduate classes on film and on the imagination. I have taught philosophy of mind modules as well as modules on Darwinism and religion and on recent philosophy of language. A long time ago I taught logic and the history and philosophy of science.

I sometimes teach master’s level courses on the philosophy of art, covering central issues in aesthetics such as the nature of aesthetic properties, values in art, and the debate over aesthetic objectivity. A follow-on course has focused on the relations between art and cognition, covering such topics as the evolution of aesthetic sensibility and the way that the mind is represented in literature and in psychology. I have also taught research methods at Masters level.

I regularly supervise doctoral students. Past doctoral students include Catharine Abell (Oxford), James Andow (UEA), David Austin, Tom Baker (Edinburgh), Tom Cochrane (Flinders), Andrew Haggerstone (founder of Kaleidoscope artist management and record company), Anna Ichino, (Milan), Nick Jones (York), Jon Jureidini (Research Leader - Robinson Research Institute, Adelaide Medical School) Fenja Ziegler (Lincoln), Daniel Acquah (Early Intervention Foundation), Francesco Gentile (McGill). Jamie Cawthra (Bloomsbury Institute). Fenja and Daniel were joint with Psychology. 

I am pleased to say that in May 2022 Xuanqi Zhu was awarded his doctorate for a thesis on nich construction and the evolution of aesthetic sense; he began a postdoctoral fellowship at Sun Yat-sen University in August 2022. In August 2022 Jacopo Frascaroli was awarded his doctorate on predictive processing and the feeling for truth in literature; he begins a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of York in September 2022. Both theses were passed without corrections.