University of East Anglia

Faculty Member, School of Philosophy

Lecturer in Philosophy

About

I received a B.A. in Philosophy and an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge. I completed my doctorate at the Humboldt University of Berlin with a thesis on Kant’s philosophy of nature for which I was awarded the Humboldt Prize. In 2006, I returned to Cambridge to take up a Junior Research Fellowship at Sidney Sussex College. At Cambridge, I taught for the Philosophy Faculty and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and was Director of Studies in Philosophy at Sidney Sussex College. I joined the School of Philosophy at UEA as a Lecturer in 2009.

Research areas: Kant, philosophy of science, philosophy of biology, the philosophy of nature and the environment, aesthetics

My research concerns questions regarding the implications of Kantian philosophy for philosophy of science, philosophy of biology and environmental philosophy. In my doctoral thesis, I developed an interpretation of Kant’s conception of nature and the way in which it defines our place as rational beings in the natural world. My post-doctoral work has explored the relevance of my Kantian approach to key questions in the philosophy of biology and environmental ethics. More specifically, I have developed a Kantian account of the regulative status of teleological concepts in the biological sciences, and proposed an analogical conception of the value of nature.

Central to all my research is a focus on the role non-empirical principles play in empirical science and cognition. This concern has led me to investigate the role of heuristic principles in science and the nature and function of analogical judgment in human cognition. I believe that important insights can be gained from a broadly Kantian understanding of aesthetics in science, and my future research aims to spell out these insights to a general philosophical audience.

Current research projects:

(1) Aesthetics in science
How should we understand judgments about the beauty of scientific theories? What bearing do such judgments have on the truth of such theories? I am interested in investigating whether we can give answers to these questions that provide an alternative to both traditional metaphysical accounts of the link between beauty and truth and prevailing contemporary conceptions that construe this link as purely contingent. My aim is to examine whether, building on a broadly Kantian account of regulative principles in science, we may conceive of aesthetics as intrinsically tied to the aims of science by appreciating the inevitable conditions of the human perspective.

(2) A Kantian account of the nature and role of analogical reasoning in human cognition
What is it to think of something by analogy with something else? How does such consideration differ from non-analogical judgments? And what distinctive insight can analogical, as opposed to non-analogical, reasoning provide? In this second research project, I am concerned with the nature of analogical reflection and the role it plays in our understanding and study of the natural world. Building on a Kantian transcendental approach, I suggest that we can conceive of the instrumental function of analogies in science as ultimately grounded in an irreducible analogical perspective, which informs the possibility of experience and cognition more generally.

(3) Kant and the Life Sciences


My research in this area deals with Kant’s concept of the organism and of the study of living nature. I am particularly interested in Kant’s claim that biology, in contrast with the physical sciences, relies not only on causal-mechanistic explanations but also on teleological principles. One of the key Kantian insights that I have sought to develop in my work is that teleological reflection provides not only a heuristic tool for biological research but also grounds our very conception of nature as alive. Bringing together insights drawn from my concerns with (1) and (2), I have argued that this conception of nature is essentially based on analogical reflection and constitutes an awareness akin to aesthetic experience.

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