Faculty Member, School of Philosophy
About
Research Interests
My central research interests revolve around, on the one hand, the notion of a human being and, on the other, the sense in which all forms of our understanding are expressive of an active engagement with the world and so embody a rich ethical dimension. Thus, a grasp of the notion of a person is embodied in my experience of and responses to other human beings. This shift from both Cartesian and physicalist approaches involves giving central place to our particular forms of embodiment and to the forms of concern for others that mark our recognition of them.
The priority that we may, in our philosophical thinking about people, be tempted to give to the first-person point of view has close links with a priority that we may, when thinking about time, be tempted to give to the present moment. With this, denials, appearing throughout the history of philosophy, of the reality of passage and of tense often reflect a failure to recognise the ways in which our differing concerns about past, present and future are fundamental to the sense of temporal distinctions.
My interest in time and the self come together in a variety of ways. One is in the idea of the recognition of the particularity of the other that is expressed most clearly in love for individual human beings. In contrast to familiar pictures that give central place to stability and continuity of psychological characteristics, any adequate characterisation of human relationships must, I argue, give central place to the fact that we are bodily beings that persist through time. Closely linked with this, traditional metaphysical disputes about the nature of the self, or about the reality of time, may be best viewed as expressions of different ‘ethical’ visions: visions of the proper place of bodily human beings, or of thought and concern about past, present and future, in our lives.
Books:
Other Human Beings (Macmillans, 1990)
Human Beings (ed) (Cambridge University Press, 1991)
Other Times: Philosophical perspectives on past, present and future (Cambridge University Press, 1997)
An Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind (Palgrave, 2001)
I teach at the University of East Anglia and at the University of Wales Lampeter
Contact Information
School of Philosophy
University of East Anglia
Norwich NR4 7TJ
United Kingdom
