Home
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Glasgow.
This site was originally created in 2014. I've updated the photograph to a more recent one (and not a close up!) than the 2014 one (which I think was actually taken around when I first came back to Glasgow in 2006!). The site was primarily created to try to influence those I thought I might have some influence on (Shug and Senga McSporran, Dunroamin, Auchenshuggle) to choose normality, choose independence, in the 2014 referendum.
I made some updates in April 2016, by which time I'd had to take medical retirement, while I still had some energy left to do so. By that stage, Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, an incurable, 'progressive' disease was within a few months of claiming my life, and I wanted to link to some recent research work, and promise I'd try to give my reflections on the referendum if able. It didn't look likely I would but the tragedy and generosity of a donor and her or his family means I have been given the chance, thanks to a double lung transplant.
But though having made a very good recovery, I haven't finished the book I'm working on, and, lung transplants having the worst survival rate of solid organ transplants, I need to get a move on! Since I don't work so fast, and with the shadow of Covid-19 hanging over the immuno-compromised especially (only compromise I've ever made😊), I've for the moment being working on some more limited pieces, drafts of which I have started to put up in the Research section. I may follow with some reflections on where now, for those of us who want to see Scotland, its people and its parliament, have equal status with other small nations and not be a sometimes patronised, sometimes despised, nothing-like-autonomous region of our ten times larger neighbour. The rest of the site is as it was in 2016 for now.