Hello! I come from Durham in the UK, where I have spent the last decade or so studying philosophy. I have been interested in philosophy for a very long time, probably because: (a) it requires lots of arguing and I love arguing, (b) it doesn’t require much actual practical knowledge of how things work and (c) you can say pretty much whatever you want as long as you can support what you say. Which is intellectual freedom at its purest.

Anyway for one reason or another, things didn’t exactly go the way that I wanted them to after I finished my PhD, and I decided that I needed to have a little adventure and take a break from it all. Hence here I am in China. I am not entirely new to Asia, as I spent a year after my undergraduate degree teaching English to annoyingly young children in South Korea. And I had an absolutely fabulous time. I knew that I wanted to stay in a University environment, so when I saw the job advertised here I thought it was a perfect opportunity to come and get to know a new part of the world and have some fun at the same time.

Philosophy is still, however, ticking away in the background and I will be trying to write away at it while I am here. While I am not doing philosophy I tend to sit around a lot and waste time. I am very good at wasting time and must stay away from computer games at all costs. I also sleep a lot.

In case anyone reads this who is at all interested in contemporary debates in analytic philosophy of mind, here is some rather technical information about what I get up to when I have my philosophy hat on. Please don’t be scared:

My research focuses upon debates in the philosophy of perception. I have been particularly concerned with the question of what the metaphysical nature of perceptual experience must be in order to satisfy certain requirements concerning phenomenology, the epistemic significance of perception, the preconditions for intentional thought, and ontological parsimony. I obtained my PhD from Durham University under the supervision of E. J. Lowe, and was examined by Tim Crane and Sophie Gibb. I offered a defence of naïve realism, which is the view that the visual experiences that we enjoy when perceiving are immediately presentational of the world around us.

I am also interested in taking work being done in the empirical sciences and applying it to issues within the philosophy of perception. For example I am currently working on the connection between hallucination as it is studied by the natural sciences and hallucination as it is thought of by philosophers.

I have published in Acta Analytica, a special issue of Philosophical Explorations devoted to the topic of disjunctivism (This is soon to be published in an anthology by Routledge), and Consciousness and Cognition. I have forthcoming publications in Logique et Analyse and Commonwealth Education Partnerships 2012/13. I am working on two more publications detailing and defending my personal conception of naive realism which I believe to have significant advantages over various alternative conceptions of the position.