I am Canada Research Chair, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University. My research brings the history of psychology to bear on contemporary cognitive science. I draw on nineteenth-century work in experimental physiology, evolutionary theory, and comparative psychology to illuminate current debates about consciousness, action, and animal minds. William James is a central figure in this project. His pragmatism was anchored in his rich (and richly neglected) empirical research program, a program that is of renewed interest in our own naturalistic era. I also work on a range of early anal…
I am Canada Research Chair, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre at McMaster University. My research brings the history of psychology to bear on contemporary cognitive science. I draw on nineteenth-century work in experimental physiology, evolutionary theory, and comparative psychology to illuminate current debates about consciousness, action, and animal minds. William James is a central figure in this project. His pragmatism was anchored in his rich (and richly neglected) empirical research program, a program that is of renewed interest in our own naturalistic era. I also work on a range of early analytic figures, including Bertrand Russell; an underappreciated source of his later naturalism was engagement with James and other psychologists.
I came to McMaster from Cal State Long Beach. I've been a Fulbright Scholar (at the University of Sheffield in 2016 -2017) and a Mellon Fellow (at Cornell in 2008-2009), and before that I held a postdoc at the University of Toronto. My PhD comes from the Philosophy Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, though I also spent lots of time in Indiana's History and Philosophy of Science Department.
