About

• I’m happy to announce that from July 1st I’ll be professor of philosophy at the ANU.

• Since 2019 I’ve been a visiting Professorial Fellow (1/5th time) in the Arché Center at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. I visit St Andrews for six weeks each year.

• My new book is now available; it’s called Barriers to Entailment and it’s about a family of theses that say that you can’t get certain sorts of conclusion from certain sorts of premises, like: you can’t get an ought from an is (Hume’s Law), or you can’t get conclusions about the future from premises about the past, or universal claims from particular ones. You can read the beginning via Preview on Google books.

  

  Other topics that I’ve worked on include the analytic/synthetic distinction and issues in the philosophy of logic, like logic’s epistemology, the normativity of logic, logic and indexicals, logical pluralism, and logical nihilism etc. Basically I can’t stop thinking about logic.

  Some people know me through a couple of papers I wrote about the philosophy of the martial arts.

  I’m also interested in social and political applications of work in both the philosophy of logic and language. You can find out more on my research page.

• I’m always looking for good MA and PhD students, especially in the philosophy of logic, on the analytic/synthetic distinction, and in philosophy of language applied to social and political issues. If you are an advanced undergraduate or masters student in philosophy who might want to work with me on any of this, please get in touch!

• Until July 2020, I was Alumni Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and I continue to supervise some students there. My first job was at Washington University in St Louis (2004–2014) and I was a Killam Postdoc at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2005. My Ph.D. is from Princeton (2004) and before that I was an undergraduate in Scotland at the University of St Andrews. Along the way I’ve been a visitor at UC Berkeley, Melbourne University, the University of Queensland, and the RSSS at the Australia National University, as well as a visiting fellow at Tilburg Center for Logic and the Philosophy of Science in the Netherlands.