Profile

I grew up in London and have been in Oxford, apart from a couple of years, since leaving home for university. I am married with a young family, which keeps me happy and tired!

I spend much of my free time catching up with friends and family (I’ve been to more than 50 pubs within the Oxford ring road). I play sport when I can, and the older I get the better I was. There’s lots of things I like to do but never get round to, like: watching films and plays, reading novels and learning to cook interesting food.

Philosophy asks questions about a lot of different things. The parts of philosophy that I work in mean thinking about stuff like time, ordinary objects and God.

Here’s one question: what’s the difference between the past, present and the future? It seems like there’s a big difference: I can only do stuff in the present, I can make a difference to the future and I can’t do anything about the past. But how does this work? One issue is that physics seems to tell us all parts of time are the same sort of thing. So how come they seem so different to us?

Thinking about these kinds of question is what metaphysics does. It isn’t easy, and it can be hard for some people to see the point in it (though I think there is a point!). But for other people these deep questions are the most interesting ones there are.

My days and weeks vary quite a lot. But there are some things that I do quite a lot. Teaching and admin take up some time (teaching is great! Admin less so…) but my research generally involves thinking about puzzles in metaphysics and trying to find new ways to solve them.

Something people often wonder about is how to do research in philosophy. Is it just sitting in a room thinking? The short answer is, not usually. Usually, I think about things by bouncing off what other philosophers are doing. So there’s lots of reading and listening and talking with other researchers. But there’s also time to sit down and try and work out my own thoughts, and that’s where I’d go off to a library or office and write things on the computer. Lots of the writing process is revising and rewriting what I did the day before! I’m lucky to get to talk through my ideas with colleagues to help make them as best they can be.

I’m generally working from 9-5 or so, Monday-Thursday (I look after my son on Fridays), but this changes when I’m away at conferences or have big deadlines.