Aesthetics: in particular, issues in the philosophy of fiction and literature; the nature of aesthetic judgement; imagination; the emotions.

*Please note: I am currently away until January 2014 on research leave at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where I am engaged in a 3 year project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation: 'Imagination, Emotion, and Value'. 

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 content of perceptual experience, the role of attention therein, and the nature of epistemic emotions.

Most of my previous research has been concerned with issues of value, focusing primarily on various topics in aesthetics that have connections with ethics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. More generally, I am interested in the nature and normativity of aesthetic and ethical judgement; expressivist theories of value; the imagination; connections between aesthetic, ethical, and epistemic values; emotion; various issues in the philosophy of fiction; the aesthetic appreciation of nature, wine, and sport. I am also interested in meta-philosophical issues such as the nature of intuitions and their use in philosophical arguments.

Publications

Monograph

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

Edited Volumes

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

Articles & Book Chapters

• 'The Structural Emphemerality of Olfaction', in T. Crowther & C. MacCumhaill (eds.), Perceptual Ephemera. Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
• ‘Fitting Emotions and Relative Values’, in S. Roeser & C. Todd (eds.) Emotion and Value, Oxford University Press (forthcoming).
• ‘Attending Emotionally to Fiction’. The Journal of Value Inquiry (forthcoming).
• ‘Attention, Negative Valence, and Tragic Emotions’, in J. Levinson & P. Destrée (eds.) The Paradox of Negative Emotions in Art: Suffering Art Gladly, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).
• ‘Imagination, Expressiveness, and Expression in the Case of Wine’, in N. Zangwill & A. Hamilton (eds.) Scruton’s Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).
• ‘Fitting Attitudes and Essentially Contestable Concepts’ in Filosofia Unisinos (forthcoming).
• ‘Imagination and Transparency’, Rivista di Estetica (forthcoming).
•  ‘Literature, Attention, and Epistemic Emotions’, in I. Vendrell & C. Demmerling (eds.) Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in Literatur, Akademie Verlag (forthcoming).
• ‘Intentionality of Emotion’ entry in H. Pashler (ed.) The Encyclopedia of the Mind, Sage, 2013.
•  ‘Imagination, Fantasy, and Sexual Desire’, in H. Maes & J. Levinson (eds.) Art and Pornography, Oxford University Press, 2012.
• ‘The Importance of the Aesthetic’ in D. Fennell (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Tourism and the Environment, Routledge, 2012.
• ‘Expression and Objectivity in Wine’, Rivista di Estetica 51 (2012): 95-116.
• ‘Percevoir l’expression émotionelle dans les objets inanimés : l’example du vin’, Dialogue: Canadian Review of Philosophy 51 (2012): 129­39.
• ‘Imaginability, Morality, and Fictional Truth: Dissolving the Puzzle of ‘Imaginative ‘Resistance’’, Philosophical Studies 143 (2009): 187-211.
• ‘Nature, Beauty and Tourism’, in J. Tribe (ed.) Philosophical Issues in Tourism, Channel View, 2009: 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): 61-79.
• 'Aesthetic, Ethical, and Cognitive Value', South African Journal of Philosophy 26 (2) (2007): 216-27.
  
• ‘The Aesthetic Appreciation of Cricket’, Sport in Society 10 (2007): 856-77.
• ‘George Dickie’, in J. Vickery and D. Costello (eds.), Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers, Berg, 2007.

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