About 

​I am an Assistant Professor in Philosophy based at the University of Durham. I specialise in early modern and nineteenth-century philosophy.

I am currently writing a monograph on the ​the role of habit in perception and cognition. It will examine a number of issues in the philosophy of perception and epistemology, including the nature of the representational mind, the relationship between spontaneity and passivity in perception, the relationship between practical and theoretical knowledge, and the influence of habit on the structure of our experience and on the way we ascribe meaning to the world. This monograph will be a work of historical philosophy (it starts from the early modern empiricists, covers debates concerning habit in nineteenth-century French and German idealist philosophy, and ends with the classical pragmatists). By focusing on debates concerning habit in modern philosophy, the monograph will reintroduce a number of forgotten yet important figures from philosophy's history in dialogue with canonical philosophers such as Hegel, James, and Peirce. A key aim of this monograph will be to show that although contemporary analytic philosophy has paid very little attention to habit, historical reflection on this topic has left us with a rich set of untapped conceptual resources that will help to illuminate a number of contemporary problems concerning perception and epistemology.  

My previous research focused on the reception of Leibnizian Metaphysics and attempts to defend and redevelop the monadology after the Kantian revolution. I have co-edited a special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy focusing on this topic (with Pauline Phemister). I have also co-authored a monograph Idealism: The History of a Philosophy, Routledge (with Iain Hamilton Grant and Sean Watson). 

Before working at Sheffield, I was a teaching fellow and then a research fellow at the Philosophy Department and Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. 

You can download my CV here