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‘Genre, and talk of genre, irritates the hell out of me, actually. I do not see why something should be the sole property of one type of book and not of another. I’ve got this notion that there’s space to get around anyone’s prejudices, and if you can just think of the right way you can slide around all the nonsense they talk and do something that involves both their Yes and their No.’

[Diana Wynne Jones]

As a philosopher I specialise in philosophy of art and related areas.  I’ve also taught Ancient Greek philosophy, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics. Here’s a selection of my book chapters: if you’d like to know when I’ve got new publications out, please register for updates. I also share books or book chapters by others that I’ve enjoyed reading on social media.

[decorative image] Photo of part of a typewriter on a desk, taken from the front at desk level, showing around 20 keys. The wall in the background is a bright, citrus colour.
Photo by Julia Kamm on Unsplash
  • ‘The best books on tech utopias and dystopias,’ (2023) interview for FiveBooks.com: the best books on everything. I took as my starting point the Ancient Greek meanings of dystopia (‘the bad place’) and utopia (‘nowhere’; pun on eutopia/’the good place’), and explored Frederic Jameson on speculative fiction and political fantasy; Friedrich Nietzsche on tragedy and the impossibility of human progress; Claire Craig on science policy-making and ‘least worst outcomes’; Svetlana Alexievich on creating new forms of consciousness; and Claudia Rankine on the technology of race.

  • ‘How to live (and how to die),’ in James South and Jacob Held eds. James Bond and Philosophy (Open Court 2006); part of the best-selling Popular Culture and Philosophy series. My chapter looks at Plato, Heidegger and Freud on risk, mortality, and a meaningful life.

  • ‘Marginalia: Black literature and the problem of recognition,’ in Kadija Sesay ed. Write Black, write British: from post-colonial to Black British literature (Hansib 2005). My chapter draws on Hegelian Master/Slave dialectic, Honneth’s philosophy of recognition and the evolution of hiphop to argue for linguistic innovation in Black literature.

  • ‘Enter the professionals,’ in Courttia Newland and Kadija Sesay eds. IC3: the Penguin book of new Black writing in Britain (Hamish Hamilton/Penguin 2001, re-issued 2021). My chapter looks at the preoccupation of African diaspora in the UK for their children to become doctors, lawyers or engineers rather than artists.
[decorative image] Photo of part of a typewriter on a desk, taken from the front at desk level, showing around 20 keys. The wall in the background is a bright, citrus colour.
Photo by Julia Kamm on Unsplash

‘To fail as a poet – and thus, for Nietzsche, to fail as a human being — is to accept somebody else’s description of oneself,
to execute a previously prepared program, to write, at most, elegant variations on previously written poems.
So the only way to trace home the causes of one’s being as one is would be to tell a story about one’s causes in a new language.’

[Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony And Solidarity]