I am Grote Professor in the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at UCL and a Senior Research Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. I was an Official Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy at Queen’s from 1988 to 2018, and Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Oxford from 2008 to 2018. I held a Getty Scholarship at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles in 2001-02, a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002-03, and a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship in 2010-12. I was Professeur Invité at the Université Paris-Sorbonne in 2014-15. I have edited the British Journal of Aesthetics since 2008.
My main research interests are in epistemology and metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action, philosophy of art, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein. In my most recent book, Action, Knowledge, and Will (OUP, 2015), I argue that human behaviour has four irreducibly different dimensions—physical, psychological, intellectual and ethical—which were amalgamated or confused in the traditional idea of a ‘will’. My work in philosophy of art has focused mainly on the visual arts. My book The Objective Eye (University of Chicago Press, 2006) is about the nature of colours and shapes, their representation in pictorial art, and the concept of realism in art theory.
