Currently I am focussing on the nature of emotion and imagination with a view to outlining their roles in value judgement. As part of this project I am also working on buck-passing accounts of value, evaluative disagreement and relativism, the phenomenology of evaluative experience, meta-cognition, and the nature of epistemic emotions.

Aesthetics, Philosophy of Mind, Metaethics.

Publications

Monograph

• The Philosophy of Wine (London: Acumen 2010). 

Edited Volumes

• Emotion and Value,co-edited with S. Roeser, Oxford University Press (2014)
• Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics,vol. II, 2010 

Articles & Book Chapters

• • ‘Representation and Ephemerality in Olfaction’, in T. Crowther & C. MacCuhmaill (eds.) Perceptual Ephemera (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
  • ‘Relatively Fitting Emotions and Apparently Objective Values’, in S. Roeser & C. Todd (eds.) Emotion and Value (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 90-104.
  • ‘Why We Do Not Perceive Aesthetic Properties’, in A. Reboul (ed.) Mind, Value and Metaphysics: philosophical papers dedicated to Kevin Mulligan vol. 2 (Springer, 2014), pp. 105-17.
  • ‘Emotion and Value’, Philosophy Compass vol. 9(2014), pp. 702-12.
  • ‘Literature, Attention, and Epistemic Emotions’, in I. Vendrell & C. Demmerling (eds.) Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in Literatur (Akademie Verlag, 2014) [in German]
  • ‘Attention, Negative Valence, and Tragic Emotions’, in J. Levinson & P. Destrée (eds.) Suffering Art Gladly: The Paradox of Negative Emotions in Art (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), pp. 224-45.
  • ‘Intentionality of Emotion’, in H. Pashler (ed.) The Encyclopedia of the Mind (Sage, 2013).
  • ‘Imagination, Attention, and Depiction’, Rivista di Estetica 53 (2013), pp. 89-108. [in Italian]
  • ‘Attending Emotionally to Fiction’, The Journal of Value Inquiry 46 (2012), pp. 449-65.
  • ‘Imagination, Expressiveness, and Expression in the Case of Wine’, in N. Zangwill & A. Hamilton (eds.) Scruton’s Aesthetics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 234-49.
  • ‘Imagination, Fantasy, and Sexual Desire’, in H. Maes & J. Levinson (eds.) Art and Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 95-115.
  • ‘The Importance of the Aesthetic’, in A. Holden & D. Fennell (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment (Routledge, 2012), pp. 65-74.
  • ‘Expression and Objectivity in Wine’, Rivista di Estetica 51 (2012), pp. 95-116.
  • ‘Perceiving Expressiveness in Inanimate Objects’, Dialogue 51 (2012), pp. 129­39. [in French].
  • ‘Imaginability, Morality, and Fictional Truth: Dissolving the Puzzle of ‘Imaginative ‘Resistance’’, Philosophical Studies 143 (2009), pp. 187-211.
  • ‘Nature, Beauty and Tourism’, in J. Tribe (ed.) Philosophical Issues in Tourism (Channel View, 2009), pp. 154-70.
  • ‘Unmasking the Truth beneath the Beauty: why the supposed aesthetic judgements made in science may not be aesthetic at all’, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 22 (1) (2008), pp. 61-79.
  • 'Aesthetic, Ethical, and Cognitive Value', South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (2) (2007), pp. 216-27.26, No. 2 (2007)
  • ‘The Aesthetic Appreciation of Cricket’, Sport in Society 10 (2007), pp. 856-77.
  • ‘George Dickie’, in J. Vickery & D. Costello (eds.), Art: Key Contemporary

  Thinkers (Berg, 2007), pp. 125-8.

  • ‘Quasi-Realism, Acquaintance, and the Normative Claims of Aesthetic Judgement’,
  British Journal of Aesthetics 44 (3) (2004), pp. 277-96.

• ‘Imagination, Attitude, and Experience’, Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics, 1 (1) (2004): 10-7.

Reviews (selection):

'Fiction and the Weave of Life' (OUP, 2007) by J. Gibson. Analysis 69 (2009): 594-6.

'Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics' (CUP, 2005) by P. Guyer. The Philosophical Quarterly 57 (2007): 313-16.

'Art and Intention: a Philosophical Study' (Oxford: Clarendon Press) by P. Livingston. The Philosophical Quarterly, 57 (2007): 153-56.

'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art' (CUP, 2003) by R. Eldridge. British Journal of Aesthetics (April 2005):

'Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology' (OUP, 2002) by G. Currie and I. Ravenscroft. British Journal of Aesthetics (October, 2003):

'The Transhistorical Image: Philosophizing Art and its History' (CUP, 2002) by P. Crowther. Philosophy in Review (October, 2003):

Research Activities

From January 2011 I will be based at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland where I will be working on a 3 year research project 'Imagination, Emotion, and Value' which explores the role of imagination and emotion in judgements of value.

I am an affiliated member of the Thumos research group at the University of Geneva where I have spent the past two summers undertaking interdisciplinary research on the emotions.

Other roles

I am currently the Treasurer and a founding member of the European Society for Aesthetics: www.eurosa.org.