St. Olaf College

Faculty Member, Philosophy

About

Having studied philosophy at Cambridge, Oxford and St Andrews, and taken my PhD at Bristol University, I taught at the University of Hertfordshire before moving to the United States in 2001. Since then I have been teaching at St. Olaf College, in Minnesota. I have published two books, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical (Oxford, 1993) and Expressing the World: Skepticism, Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Open Court, 2003) as well as numerous articles; I also co-edited, with Prof. J. Davenport, a collection of essays, Kierkegaard After MacIntyre (Open Court, 2001)
My research interests have fallen into two main clusters. The first is a set of issues in ethics, moral psychology and philosophy of religion, which I have mostly approached through my writings on Kierkegaard. In these I have tried to show that Kierkegaard is a philosopher who has much to contribute to contemporary philosophical debates. The second cluster consists of issues in epistemology (especially skepticism) and the philosophy of mind. I see the problem of our knowledge of the external world and the mind-body problem as the two main forms taken by the single basic problem of how to understand the place of subjectivity in the wider world. This problem remains apparently both unavoidable and intractable. I have drawn heavily on both Wittgenstein and Heidegger in thinking about these issues, though I do not regard myself as either an orthodox Wittgensteinian or an orthodox Heideggerian.

I have most recently been working on a book which has now been accepted for publication by Oxford University Press, under the title Self, Value and Narrative: a Kierkegaardian Approach. This book draws on Kierkegaard, as well as debates in recent and contemporary philosophy to defend an account of the self it calls the NEST (Narrative, Evaluative, Self-Constitutive, Teleological) theory. For more detail please see the summary of the book now posted.

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