About
I've been at Liverpool since 2023 - initially as a Lecturer. In 2025, I joined the ERC/UKRI KantianDESERT project. Before coming to Liverpool I studied for my PhD at Essex, before holding teaching positions at Warwick, Hull, and Durham.
My work is heavily influenced by Frankfurt School critical theory, as well as the so-called 'Oxford Quartet' (the great generation of Anglophone moral philosophers who studied together at Oxford in the late 30s and early 40s: G.E.M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch). But I also have expertise in post-Kantian continental philosophy more generally (especially philosophy from Kant to Kierkegaard - including Marx). Mostly I'm interested in what 'the human being' is, what 'nature' is, and how our understanding of these things is transformed by the fact of the climate crisis. Relatedly, I am interested in the ethics of parenthood (again in the context of the climate crisis). In the context of KantianDESERT project, I am particularly interested in the relationship between desert, recognition, and need.
In 2021, I published my first book - a philosophical memoir about fatherhood and the concept of hope, and in 2022 I published a new creative abridgement of Marx and Engels's 'The German Ideology'. My next book, under contract with Bloomsbury, will be on the concept 'human' and its relevance to ethics.
Outside of philosophy I like reading literature, writing about art, and trying to figure out how the world seems from the perspective of my two small (though increasingly large) and energetic children.