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About Me

I am a senior lecturer in philosophy in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological, and Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews. Information about my teaching and other activities can be found on my staff website.

I am generally interested in the philosophy of the human sciences, particularly those that connect philosophical views on identity with the understanding of social interactions. This interest has led me to the thought of Benedict de Spinoza – an early pioneer of philosophical anthropology. My other interests include philosophy of religion, political economy, British Idealism, and early Daoist texts, especially the Zhuangzi.

My new book, Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, traces out what I believe to be a single line of thought found in three very different sources: the Zhuangzi, the philosophy of Spinoza, and the theory of René Girard. This thought links our mimetic tendencies to the pursuit of a stable and definitive individual identity, suggesting that this pursuit lies at the origin of some of our profoundest social pathologies and promoting a path of escape through learning to openly embrace indeterminacy, ambiguity, uncertainty, and difference.

My book, The Philosophy of Hope: Beatitude in Spinoza, aims to introduce and develop Spinoza’s theory of beatitude. This is the culmination of Spinoza’s theory of desire, since it describes the condition of ultimate satisfaction. Although Spinoza saw beatitude as the ultimate goal towards which his philosophy reached, there are few interpretative works devoted primarily to this theme. Spinoza’s theory of beatitude is, in my view, the keystone that holds together diverse parts of his philosophy – in particular his metaphysics, his social theory, and his philosophical anthropology. These are often studied separately; my introduction to beatitude aims at helping readers understand Spinoza’s philosophy as a unified whole. His theory is also of continuing relevance, since it pursues a spiritual goal as the antidote to various social dysfunctions without belonging entirely to any specific religious tradition. I also agree with Feng Youlan that Spinoza’s theory of beatitude has striking parallels with the philosophy found in the Zhuangzi and its early commentaries.

My first book, Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism, proposed a new interpretation of Spinoza, situating him in the context of debates within the Dutch Cartesian tradition, over the status of philosophy and its relation to theology.

I have also published a book examining the concept of debt from the perspective of language, history, and political economy.

I am a founder and co-director of the Future of Work and Income Research Network at the Centre for Ethics, Philosophy, and Public Affairs. This is an interdisciplinary network of scholars and researchers, inside and outside the academy, whose work addresses the biggest questions concerning the future of work – what it might be, and what it could be.

I am on the Executive Committee of the Aristotelian Society and the Management Committee of the British Society for the History of Philosophy. And I am a Research Scholar at the Global Institute for Sustainable Policy.