Department of Business Humanities and Law

My philosophical research has predominantly been focused on the epistemic and practical role of reasons and rationality. I have investigated the restraints that a realist theory of mental content, scientific postulates, and moral truth place on a non-skeptical account of our reasoning. My PhD and my early work focused on the how we should conceive of experience in order to conserve its role as an epistemic reason for thought about an objective mind-independent reality. This interest has in my later work become accompanied by a wider concern with how we should conceive of self-conscious reasoning in both practical and theoretical deliberation. My work takes its primary historical inspiration from Plato, Kant and Frege, while relying on the work of their modern interpreters such as John McDowell, Charles Travis, Christine Korsgaard, and Robert Brandom. In my published work I have defended a disjunctive account of perception and reasoning in general. Beyond continued research in this area, I also work on the project of teasing out the consequences of conceiving of epistemology and moral deliberation as guides to a distinctively self-conscious practical concern with determining what to think and what to do. This stand opposed to the predominant conception of these fields as concerned with the descriptive endeavours of figuring out who has knowledge and who acted morally.  

In my recent work within management and economic theory, my focus on reasoning and deliberation has led me to work on stakeholder theory, and how we can conceive of the role of corporate governance in ways different from the idea of mere coordination or adjudication between inherently opposed atomistic and self-interested individuals. I have also worked on the importance role that a deliberative commitment to realist truth has in preserving the social cohesion of society. My work on scientific realism has led me to challenge both the scientific credentials of agency theory as an account of human motivation, as well as the prescriptive and policy advising aspirations of modern economic theory.