About me

Academic career

I joined University College Dublin as a Teaching Fellow in Philosophy in 2023, and will be a Lecturer/Assistant Professor there from June 2024. I am currently Co-Director of UCD’s interdisciplinary Cognitive Science programme and co-ordinate an M.A. in the Philosophy of Mind and Embodied Cognition.

Prior to this I completed a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oslo on the Perceiving Representations: A Study of Structural Commonalities between Language, Pictures and Music project (2019–2023).

In 2017, I was awarded John Templeton Foundation research funding via the University of Cambridge’s New Directions in the Study of the Mind initiative for a pilot project on the temporal structure of experience. I have since taught various courses in the philosophy of mind and perception at the Universities of Edinburgh, Oslo, and Tübingen.

Between 2014 and 2017, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC-funded interdisciplinary research project, Rethinking the Senses: Uniting the Philosophy and Neuroscience of Perception at the University of Glasgow, which investigated the implications of multi-modality, i.e. sensory experiences involving two or more senses, for the philosophy and science of perception.

In 2014, I received a Student-Led Teaching Award for Outstanding Support for the Learning Experience of Students, voted for by students at the University of Sussex, and I was also nominated for Edinburgh University Student Association teaching awards in 2017 and 2018.

From January 2013 to June 2014, I taught philosophy at the University of Sussex, convening undergraduate modules in the Philosophy of Mind, Perception and Reality, Philosophy of Science, and Ancient Philosophy (Plato), as well as teaching MA modules in the Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Perception.

Education

I studied philosophy at the Universities of York, St Andrews, Warwick, and Columbia, New York, where I was a visiting Ph.D. student.

I completed my doctorate in the philosophy of mind and perception at the University of Warwick in 2013, where I was supervised by Professors Bill Brewer and Matthew Soteriou.

My Ph.D. thesis concerned the nature of perceptual, i.e. sensory, experience—a topic that has always fascinated me and which, along with the temporal structure of experience, continues to form the focus of my research.

Background

Before studying philosophy, I worked as a computer programmer and software engineer. I wrote several bestselling computer games for the Amstrad CPC computer and other software titles for Ocean/Imagine Software, Cascade, Rombo Productions, HiSoft, Digita International, and Ingenta. Further details of my transition from IT to philosophy can be found here.

I am a trained studio and live sound engineer, and when not doing philosophy I enjoy listening to and playing music (mainly guitar and keyboards, though I’ve also been known to sing), as well as photography, reading, tooting, tweeting, film, and travel.

I currently live in Dublin with my wife and son.

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