Welcome to my web page!

Bio

I am a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and past Department Head at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. After earning my Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1993, I taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and then at the University of Utah, before joining the faculty of the University of Tennessee Department of Philosophy in 2018. In 2024-25, I was the Fulbright Canada Reseach Chair in Digital Humanities at the University of Guelph. 

My work ranges across philosophy of science, social and political philosophy, agency and practical reasoning, and the phenomenology of human life; but its underlying concern is with the forms of order, dependence, trust, and intelligibility that make human thought and action possible in the shared common world.

A recurring ambition in my work has been to expose and dislodge misleading philosophical starting points. Without Hierarchy challenged the assumption that explanation must proceed from a single privileged scale or from allegedly fundamental smallest units. A Social Theory of Freedom challenged an equally entrenched inheritance in the theory of freedom: the assumption that freedom is best understood through the metaphysics of constraint and determinism, rather than through the social forms of agency, self-formation, and life with others. In both cases, the aim was not merely to shift emphasis, but to alter the point of departure so that the phenomena themselves could come properly into view.

Reasoning in the Wild extends that strategy into the domain of reason. It rejects the picture of reasoning as something housed primarily in solitary minds and only secondarily expressed in public. Reasoning is better understood as temporally organized activity, distributed across persons, practices, institutions, media, and relations of trust. Across these projects, the through-line is a resistance to philosophical pictures that isolate what is in fact structured, distributed, and relational, and a corresponding effort to reconceive explanation, freedom, and reason in terms adequate to the worlds in which they actually operate.

I’ve authored numerous articles on causation, explanation and how relations between micro and macro are handled by a range of scientific theories; as well as articles in political philosophy, action theory, metaphysics, epistemology, logical paradox and feminism. My work has won the inaugural Royal Institute of Philosophy Essay Prize (2012), and again in 2013, the inaugural Diametros International Prize competition (2017) and the American Philosophical Assn’s Kavka Prize (1999). I'm a former fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Advanced Studies of the Australian National University, the Tanner Humanities Center, the University of Sydney Center for Foundations of Science, and the Institute of Philosophy, University of London.

At my site on PhilPeople , you will find links and abstracts to many of my publications.  And here’s a more traditional CV.

Current project: Intelligence Reports

My current work in phenomenology is organized around two linked book projects. The Lived Report develops an existential phenomenology of human life among humans, beginning not from a private theater of consciousness but from the field of acts through which persons navigate dependence, trust, interpretation, rupture, and repair. It asks what human life looks like when described through temporally organized doings—requesting, refusing, promising, relying, offending, forgiving, reading, and being read—rather than through isolated inner states.

A companion project, The Queried Report, extends this inquiry into the new corridors of conversation with generative AI. It examines the hybrid field formed when a human prompt meets a model’s completion: the constraints, continuities, refusals, and hidden structures that shape the exchange. The aim is not to anthropomorphize language models, but to describe the new kind of encounter they make possible, and to ask how these systems are beginning to alter the phenomenology of inquiry, expression, dependence, and judgment in ordinary life.

A further project concerns outrage as a socially organized mode of moral and political life. Rather than treating outrage simply as a private emotion, the project asks how it gathers force in public, how it coordinates attention and judgment, and how it moves through shared narratives, media, and moral expectations. The aim is to understand outrage both as a response to injury and as a force that can reshape, and sometimes damage, the conditions of collective life.

Are you looking for a thesis supervisor?

If you are, I am happy to talk with you about the possibility of serving as your supervisor. If you already have a topic in mind, simply contact me. If you are also looking for a topic on which to work, and you might be interested in topics I have worked on or am currently working on, please have a look here before contacting me.