Staff profile

I am author of Dispositions (Oxford, 1998), Russell on Metaphysics (Routledge, 2003), Laws in Nature (Routledge, 2004), David Armstrong (Acumen, 2007), Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion (Routledge, 2011), Getting Causes from Powers (Oxford, 2011 with Rani Lill Anjum), Metaphysics: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2012) and Causation: a Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2013 with Rani Lill Anjum). I was editor of George Molnar's posthumous Powers: a Study in Metaphysics (Oxford, 2003) and Metaphysics and Science (Oxford, 2013 with Matthew Tugby). My PhD was from the University of Leeds in 1994 and I was at Nottingham between 1995 and 2016, serving served as Head of the Department of Philosophy, Head of the School of Humanities and Dean of the Faculty of Arts. I am currently completing a number of book projects: What Tends to Be: Essays on the Dispositional Modality and Causation in Science: on the Methods of Scientific Discovery (both with Rani Lill Anjum). I will shortly be publishing my first philosophical novel, Glimpse of Light (Bloomsbury). From 2016 to 2019 I will be on leave as I hold a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on the metaphysics of nothingness and absence. The project will result in a book to be called Nothing Really Matters.

 Supervision

I supervise theses and dissertations primarily in metaphysics.

 

• Metaphysics (esp. absences and causal powers)
• Philosophy of Medicine
• History of Philosophy (esp. Ancient Philosophy and Hume)
• Philosophy of Sport
• Modality