Biography

I obtained my PhD from the University of Warwick in 2004. From 2004 to 2012 I worked in the Philosophy Department at the University of Dundee. I joined the University of Aberdeen in January 2013.

I teach and research the history of philosophy (modern and early modern) and recent continental philosophy. At Aberdeen I have taught courses on Descartes, Hume, Kant, history of political philosophy, history of ethics, and aesthetics. My research interests are mainly in early modern and modern metaphysics and political philosophy, especially Spinoza, Kant, German Idealism, and Deleuze. I am currently working on a book on Spinoza and Equality.

I am the author of Kant and Spinozism: Transcendental Idealism and Immanence from Jacobi to Deleuze and Spinoza's Ethics: an Edinburgh Philosophical Guide.

I am the editor of Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio and Spinoza Beyond Philosophy, and co-editor of the Bloomsbury Companion to Continental Philosophy.

Research Overview

I work primarily on the history of philosophy, particularly Spinoza and Kant, and its relationship to recent continental philosophy.

I am currently working on a book on Spinoza and Equality. In the book I deny that Spinoza is an egalitarian in the standard sense of holding persons to be moral equals. I argue that Spinoza relies on a largely unacknowledged yet distinctive and historically grounded concept of equality: equality as a state of being. The book explores the significance of this concept for Spinoza's metaphysics and political philosophy, and suggests that it is only through this concept that we can understand the specific sense in which Spinoza is an egalitarian.

The book is partly based on research undertaken in the AHRC project Equalities of Wellbeing in Philosophy and Architecture for which I was Principal Investigator (2013-16). The project focused on the connection between Spinoza's concept of equality and architectural theory, drawing on a shared notion of proportion. Our aim was to investigate this distinctive way of thinking about equality, and to consider how it can affect the wellbeing of individuals and communities through the built environment. An edited book based on the project, Spinoza's Philosophy of Ratio, was published by Edinburgh University Press (2018).

I am director of the Spinoza Research Network, an interdisciplinary group of over 200 Spinoza researchers worldwide. I also do occasional interdisciplinary research on philosophy and museums.

Funding and Grants

2013-16: AHRC Standard Research Grant for Equalities of Wellbeing in Philosophy and Architecture

2012-13: Research Fellowship with the Centre for Arts and Humanities Research at the Natural History Museum, London

2008-10: AHRC Networks Grant for the Spinoza Research Network