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I am a professor of philosophy at UCL and currently the head of the department. I have been at UCL since 1990 when I was appointed a lecturer there. Between 2005 and 2008 I was the founding director of the Institute of Philosophy in the University of London. The Institute is now directed by Professor Barry C. Smith.

In September 2009 I will leave UCL to take up the Knightbridge Professorship of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. When it was founded in 1683, this chair was the ‘Professorship of Moral Theology or Casuisticall Divinity’.

My work is mostly in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics. I have defended a non-physicalist account of the mind, and an intentionalist conception of mental phenomena. Recently I’ve been working on existence and non-existence. I have also had some things to say about causation and perception.

I am married to the philosopher Katalin Farkas, who teaches at the Central European University, Budapest.

Before I came to London I studied at the University of Cambridge with Jeremy Butterfield and Hugh Mellor. I obtained my PhD in 1989.

I also studied at the University of Wisconsin Madison (1987-88), at the University of York (1984-85), and at the University of Durham where I got my BA in philosophy in 1984.

Before that I was at school in Oxford, at a school that no longer exists, called St Edmund Campion Roman Catholic Upper School.

Sometime before that, in 1962, I was born.

Serious photo by Sanne Lodahl

Alghero, Sardinia October 2008

About me