Philosophy

My research focuses on the analysis and justification of rights, paying particular attention to the varying ways that different types of rights (eg 'human rights', property rights, promissory rights, legal rights) are justified.  

In pursuing this research, I engage in a range of philosophical-political problems: the moral relationship between the individual, the family and wider groups; the distinction between positive and negative rights, and the impact of this issue on the morality of charity and global poverty; the nature of the rectificatory duties generated when rights are violated; the history of theories of rights, including in particular Hobbes, Locke, Hume and Kant; metaethical problems in the foundations of rights including comparison of constructivist and foundationalist approaches; Hohfeld's analytical framework and its relationship to the interest theory/will theory debate in the conceptual analysis of rights; the individuation of rights; the analysis of 'human rights' and the legitimacy of their claim to universality.  

A guiding aim of my research is to demonstrate how philosophical positions bear on the justification of public policies.

I work mainly on the philosophy of criminal law - in particular on the philosophy of punishment, on issues that connect philosophy of action with the basic principles of criminal liability, and on the moral and political preconditions of criminal liability. My books are Trials and Punishments (CUP, 1986); Intention, Agency and Criminal Liability (Blackwell, 1990); Criminal Attempts (OUP, 1996); and Punishment, Communication and Community (OUP 2000).

I have also edited collections of readings on punishment, and edited and contributed to collections of new essays on criminal law theory (Philosophy and the Criminal Law: Principle and Critique, CUP 1998; Defining Crimes, OUP 2005). My current project, 'Answering for Crime', for which I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2002-2005), is on the structures of the criminal law  and of criminal responsibility.

I am also involved, with Sandra Marshall of this Department, Lindsay Farmer (Glasgow Law School) and Victor Tadros (Edinburgh Law School) in a three-year inter-disciplinary project, 'The Trial on Trial', funded by the AHRC, which is exploring the possibility of a normative theory of the criminal trial.

My research interests centre on issues in the philosophies of action, language, and perception.

I am interested in the nature of bodily action. I have written on the relationship between bodily action and bodily movement. And I am currently working on the epistemology of bodily action, as part of my contribution to an AHRC-funded project on the value of knowledge.

I am also interested in the nature of objectivity. I have written on the relationship between naturalism and objectivity in the work of John McDowell. And I am currently working on some related issues in the work of Donald Davidson.

I am also interested in the epistemology of perceptual knowledge. I have edited a collection on disjunctivism (with Fiona Macpherson of the University of Glasgow). And I have recently completed a monograph on the nature and value of knowledge (with Alan Millar of the University of Stirling and Duncan Pritchard of the University of Edinburgh).

My interests in philosophy are very broad.  Although I am first and foremost a moral philosopher (broadly construed), I am also interested in epistemology, philosophy of action, and philosophy mind.  More specifically, I am interested in the normative aspects of these subjects. I am currently working on various topics within the theories of practical reason and rationality. 

I am a long-standing member of the Department with research interests which connect legal, political and social philosophy. The general context of my current research is the debate concerning liberal and communitarian theories in political and legal philosophy. The approach is broadly analytic and recent work includes papers on the family, privacy and the idea of community. I am now working on theories of criminalization, situational crime prevention and friendship. In addition to moral, political and legal philosophy, my main teaching areas also include ancient Greek philosophy.

My main research interests are in philosophy of mind and the theory of knowledge. In Understanding People: Normativity and Rationalizing Explanation (Oxford University Press, 2004), I argue that normative considerations play an important role in predicting and explaining human thought and action. I argue that the concepts of belief and intention are normative concepts and that this has significant implications for our understanding of human thought and action. I am currently working on perceptual knowledge, the epistemology of testimony, and why knowledge matters. Currently, all of this is in the context of an AHRC funded project, The Value of Knowledge.

My research interests are in the history of analytic philosophy and the philosophy of logic and mathematics.  The principal focus of much of my research has been Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; surrounding this work, I have published papers on Frege, Russell, and Ramsey.   

From 2003-2006 I will be involved in an AHRC-funded research project on the interpretation of the Tractatus which aims to explore how Wittgenstein's critical conception of the task and method of philosophy emerges out of his detailed engagement with the logical theories of his predecessors in the analytic tradtion.

Information about this project and its meetings is available via the link below.

More information on Wittgenstein's Tractatus

My primary research interests are in philosophy of science (especially cognitive science, psychology, biology, artificial intelligence and artificial life) and philosophy of mind. I also work on Descartes, on Heidegger, and on environmental philosophy. Although my style of argument is firmly analytic, I am keen to explore philosophy at the interface between the analytic and the continental traditions. My doctoral work provided the springboard for a book (Reconstructing the Cognitive World: the Next Step) which was published in 2005 by MIT. In this book I draw on sources as seemingly disparate as Heidegger and AI-oriented robotics, in order to articulate and defend a non-standard philosophical framework for cognitive science. Interpreted within this framework, some recent empirical work in cognitive science is revealed as going beyond the recognisably Cartesian understanding of mind that still dominates the field. Elsewhere, in recently published and forthcoming papers, I have continued a long-term critical engagement with representational explanation in cognitive science, taken a fresh look at John Searle's Chinese Room argument, attempted to clarify the conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology, responded to Andy Clark's claim that language is a special kind of externally located tool that extends the cognitive capabilities of some biological minds, examined the received biological view of genes as coding for phenotypic traits, and argued that not only has biological science recently rediscovered a supposedly discredited Aristotelian account of organismic development, but that this rediscovery has important implications for the way in which some environmental ethicists appeal to biological facts to support their positions. As an adjunct to my philosophical work, I was, for some time, involved in a project in which artificial life simulation techniques were used to investigate the evolution of honesty in animal communication systems.

In 2005 I was the national co-ordinator for a series of Arts and Humanities Research Council workshops on the topic of The Interactive Mind. For more details on this project, follow this link:

The Interactive Mind