About

Some things about me:

1. I’m Professor of Philosophy at the new Dianoia Research Institute at ACU in Melbourne, Australia.

2. I’m also a part-time Professorial Fellow at the Arché Research Center at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. I next expect to be in Scotland in person 24th April – 5th June 2023.

3. I have a new book coming out soon (probably September) called Barriers to Entailment: Hume’s Law and other limits on logical consequence. It’s about theses that say that you can’t get certain sorts of conclusions from certain sorts of premises, like: you can’t get an ought from an is, or you can’t get conclusions about the future from premises about the past, or universal claims from particular ones.

   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.

4. 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 here at the Dianoia Institute in Melbourne, please get in touch! There are funding opportunities for both domestic and international students, and application deadlines are in April and October. You can find out more about how to apply for admission and funding here.

5. 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.

6. My first job was at Washington University in St Louis (2004–2014) and I was a Postdoc at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2005. I also visited Australia a lot while I was a grad student.

7. My Ph.D. is from Princeton (2004) and before that I was an undergraduate at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. Along the way I’ve been a visitor at UC Berkeley, Melbourne University, 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.

8. Here is a copy of my CV (pdf).