Bio

I’m a philosopher based at the University of Lisbon, and this is a short bio. I was born in Edmonton, Canada, and grew up in Denbigh, North Wales. I attended Ysgol Glan Clwyd, St Asaph,  before going to Imperial College London to study physics. I left after two years (D’oh!) to study philosophy at Liverpool University (93-96), and did my MPhil and PhD at King’s College London (96-98 and 02-06). During my career break between MPhil and PhD, I moved to Bangor and played in a band for a while, ran out of money, did an I.T. training course, got a 9-5 teaching job in Caernarfon, saved some money, and spent two years travelling in southeast Asia and Australia.

While in Australia, I had a string of jobs, including: dishwasher (and stand-in chef, when Dave O’Reilly was too drunk to cook), charity collector, database programmer, spreadsheet analyst, personal assistant, data entry clerk (shudders), petrol promoter (I have never even driven a car), photocopier salesman (I sold 0 photocopiers in 2 weeks and made 0 dollars), farmhand, crewman on a diveboat, human signpost for a warehouse selling dodgy designer clothes (!), security guard for said warehouse (someone literally stole my phone while I was wandering around trying to look dangerous), almost-binman (don’t ask), and toilet cleaner. That was enough to persuade me that whatever the pressures and drawbacks of academic life, on balance it had to be better than most of the other jobs out there (I still think that most of the time). I wrote my PhD proposal in a grimy backpacker hovel near Central Station, Sydney, on a laptop borrowed from my then employers, Woollahra Council. (Thanks Linda!)

I was a fixed-term lecturer at KCL and Sheffield, and had postdocs at the Institute of Philosophy, KCL, and Oxford University, before arriving in Lisbon as an FCT Researcher funded by the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia. I specialise in Metaphysics, Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy of Mind. I publish primarily on powers, causation, emergence, realization and related topics at the intersection of metaphysics and the philosophies of science and mind. I am now a lecturer at the University of Lisbon philosophy department, and a member of the LanCog research group. I teach cognitive science, philosophy of mind, and epistemology.