Since 2013 I have been Chair of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow and, since 2016, the Editor of The Monist. Previously I was a Reader in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall and have been the Bertrand Russell Visiting Professor at McMaster University where the Russell Archive is held. I have also been a Reader at the University of St. Andrews, where I was a Director of Arché, and at Birkbeck College London.
The focus of my research has always been on how language touches upon reality: how the weight of truth is carried by what exists. This is one of the big questions that philosoph…
Since 2013 I have been Chair of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow and, since 2016, the Editor of The Monist. Previously I was a Reader in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity Hall and have been the Bertrand Russell Visiting Professor at McMaster University where the Russell Archive is held. I have also been a Reader at the University of St. Andrews, where I was a Director of Arché, and at Birkbeck College London.
The focus of my research has always been on how language touches upon reality: how the weight of truth is carried by what exists. This is one of the big questions that philosophy must answer, and doing so requires us to understand how natural, scientific and mathematical languages operate and fit together. Absolutely key to such an understanding is an appreciation of how order arises in the world—what it is that makes things apt to be counted and measured—and how we are able to succeed in encoding information about order.
My recent articles concern meta-ontology, truth-making, neo-Fregeanism and essentialism, and my forthcoming monograph on the history of early analytic philosophy emphasizes the neglected works of the early Moore, Stout, and Whitehead, as well as offering a new understanding of the contributions of Russell, Wittgenstein and Ramsey to the Problem of Universals. I am now writing a book on the metaphysics of relations.
