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I'm a philosopher working primarily in social ontology, and also in some other areas like the philosophy of logic, metaphysics and metasemantics. I work at the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds as a Research Fellow and Research Development Assistant (I advise on research funding applications). I am currently attached as a researcher to the ERC Consolidator Project Group Thinking: New Foundations, led by Robbie Williams. This project studies the attribution of attitudes and actions to groups, and tries to develop a theory of group agency along roughly Lewis-style interpretationist lines.

Within social ontology, I'm interested in some very general questions about social facts: how they come about, how they interrelate and relate to other kinds of facts about the world, and what logical constraints they can be expected to obey. I'm interested in counterfactual reasoning about social facts, and in the relativity (if such it should be called) of social facts to cultures. In tackling all these sorts of questions, I'm attracted to what we might call two-dimensional models of social reality, whereby social facts are a function of other sorts of facts, and the nature of this function is itself contingent upon further facts. I am working on a series of related papers applying this sort of view, which may turn into a book down the line.

A quick rundown of my antecedents, for those interested: I did my PhD at Leeds as well (2009-2013), under the supervision of Robbie Williams, Jason Turner and Robin Le Poidevin, and before that I did my undergraduate and MA degrees (both in philosophy) at Leiden University in the Netherlands. My PhD research was on the metaphysics of logic: whether the logical vocabulary, in all its utility and apparent indispensability, tells us something about the structure of reality. I argued that it does not (see my thesis here). After my PhD I was a postdoc at the University of Aberdeen, attached to the AHRC project The Metaphysical Basis of Logic (2013-2015) which was run by Franz Berto and also starred Toby Meadows. I then returned to Leeds, where I joined the Nature of Representation ERC project (2015-2017), and where I've been since.

Apart from here on this page and hopefully somewhere in concrete reality, you can find me on twitter and on philpapers. I'm also technically on academia.edu and on linkedin but those are mere territorial markings and only exist to buoy me up in search results.

In my spare time I make music, I tap dance and I play tabletop roleplaying games.