About

• I’m a professor in the school of philosophy/RSSS at the Australian National University.

• I am also a visiting Professorial Fellow (1/5th time) in the Arché Research Center at the University of St Andrews, in Scotland. I visit St Andrews for six weeks each year, and my next visit is 24th April – 5th June 2026.

• I was recently elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities – thank you to everyone who supported my nomination.

• I currently serve as the Honours Convenor for philosophy at the ANU. Prospective and current honours students can contact me here. There is some general info about applying for Honours in Philosophy here and here.

• My most recent book is Barriers to Entailment. It’s about a family of theses that say that you can’t get certain sorts of conclusion from certain sorts of premises, like: you can’t get an ought from an is (Hume’s Law), or you can’t get conclusions about the future from premises about the past, or universal claims from particular ones. You can read the beginning via Preview on Google books and it’s now out in paperback worldwide.

  Other topics that I’ve worked on include the analytic/synthetic distinction and issues in the philosophy of logic, like logic’s epistemology, the normativity of logic, logic and indexicals, logical pluralism, logical nihilism, whether there could be feminist logic etc. Basically I can’t stop thinking about logic.

  Some people know me through a couple of papers I wrote about the philosophy of the martial arts.

  I’m also interested in social and political applications of work in both the philosophy of logic and language. You can find out more on my papers page.

• I’m looking for PhD students, especially in the philosophy of logic (including barriers to entailment), on the analytic/synthetic distinction, and in philosophy of language applied to social and political issues. If you are an advanced undergraduate or masters student in philosophy who might want to work with me on any of this at the ANU, please get in touch! There’s more info about applying to our PhD program here.

• Until July 2020, I was Alumni Distinguished Professor in Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And then from 2020–2024 I was a research-only professor at the Dianoia Research Institute in Analytic Philosophy at ACU in Melbourne. (I’m tempted to include this as a career “lowlight” on Rae Langton‘s model, since the Institute was shut down in 2024 and we all lost our jobs, but in truth working there was fantastic and—given that I’ve found a great job to go on to at the ANU—I can’t bring myself to regret it.)

  My first job out of grad school was at Washington University in St Louis (2004–2014) and I was also a Killam Postdoc at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 2005. My Ph.D. is from Princeton (2004) and before that I was an undergraduate in Scotland at the University of St Andrews. Along the way I’ve been a visitor at UC Berkeley, Melbourne University, the University of Queensland, and the RSSS at the Australia National University, as well as a visiting fellow at Tilburg Center for Logic and the Philosophy of Science in the Netherlands.