I am a Canada Research Chair (tier 1), Director of the Bertrand Russell Research Centre, and Associate Professor of Philosophy at McMaster University. My research focuses on the history and philosophy of psychology, with a special emphasis on interactions with early analytic philosophy and pragmatism. William James has been a central focus. I have a monograph forthcoming with Oxford entitled Consciousness Is Motor: Warp and Weft in William James. That work has led me to an interest in Russell in his naturalistic phase as well.
A hallmark of my work has been the analysis of experimental results, often in physiology and psychology, that have been thought to have philosophical significance. My book on James is an example of this emphasis. It presents James's evolutionary account of consciousness as a contribution to a controversy in physiology over a series of startling vivisection experiments. The controversy was over incompatible mechanistic and vitalistic interpretations of experiments on living, decapitated vertebrates (most typically frogs). Participants included T. H. Huxley, Eduard Pflüger, and G. H. Lewes, a founder of British emergentism. They were fundamentally divided over the extent to which physiology could be a fully mechanical science, or whether it must sometimes appeal to minds, souls, or other nonphysical factors. The argument stretched back through Marshall Hall, La Mettrie, and Georg Stahl, ultimately to Descartes. James's intervention involved bringing distinctively Darwinian considerations to bear on the matter, considerations that even the likes of Huxley had overlooked.
Although philosophers remember Bertrand Russell's pointed attacks on pragmatism, he was in fact positively influenced by James's more empirical work in psychology, and after about 1919 by James's more purely philosophical account of the mind-body relationship as well, an account Russell dubbed "neutral monism." Other figures in the history of (often scientific) philosophy on whom I have written include Ernst Mach, W. V. Quine, C. S. Peirce, H. Helmholtz, T. H. Green, Kurd Laßwitz, George Berkeley, and Francis Galton.
Another interest is in computational tools developed in the digital humanities. I am in the process of establishing the Digital Philosophy Laboratory, whose mission will be to cultivate new methods for employing computational techniques like topic modeling and sentiment analysis in the study of philosophy, particularly in the history of philosophy. Our connection with the Russell Archives (housed at McMaster) puts us in a special position to apply these digital methods in the study of early analytic philosophy.
Recently, I completed a Fulbright year at the University of Sheffield (2016 - 2017), which is where my book on James's account of consciousness was born. In 2019, I came to McMaster from the Philosophy Department at Cal State Long Beach. In 2008-2009 I was a Mellon Fellow in Philosophy at Cornell, and before that I held a postdoc at the University of Toronto. My PhD comes from the Philosophy Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I worked with the philosopher of biology Elisabeth Lloyd. Her primary appointment is in Indiana's History and Philosophy of Science Department, from which I also have an MA.
Click here for a letter to prospective graduate students.
A hallmark of my work has been the analysis of experimental results, often in physiology and psychology, that have been thought to have philosophical significance. My book on James is an example of this emphasis. It presents James's evolutionary account of consciousness as a contribution to a controversy in physiology over a series of startling vivisection experiments. The controversy was over incompatible mechanistic and vitalistic interpretations of experiments on living, decapitated vertebrates (most typically frogs). Participants included T. H. Huxley, Eduard Pflüger, and G. H. Lewes, a founder of British emergentism. They were fundamentally divided over the extent to which physiology could be a fully mechanical science, or whether it must sometimes appeal to minds, souls, or other nonphysical factors. The argument stretched back through Marshall Hall, La Mettrie, and Georg Stahl, ultimately to Descartes. James's intervention involved bringing distinctively Darwinian considerations to bear on the matter, considerations that even the likes of Huxley had overlooked.
Although philosophers remember Bertrand Russell's pointed attacks on pragmatism, he was in fact positively influenced by James's more empirical work in psychology, and after about 1919 by James's more purely philosophical account of the mind-body relationship as well, an account Russell dubbed "neutral monism." Other figures in the history of (often scientific) philosophy on whom I have written include Ernst Mach, W. V. Quine, C. S. Peirce, H. Helmholtz, T. H. Green, Kurd Laßwitz, George Berkeley, and Francis Galton.
Another interest is in computational tools developed in the digital humanities. I am in the process of establishing the Digital Philosophy Laboratory, whose mission will be to cultivate new methods for employing computational techniques like topic modeling and sentiment analysis in the study of philosophy, particularly in the history of philosophy. Our connection with the Russell Archives (housed at McMaster) puts us in a special position to apply these digital methods in the study of early analytic philosophy.
Recently, I completed a Fulbright year at the University of Sheffield (2016 - 2017), which is where my book on James's account of consciousness was born. In 2019, I came to McMaster from the Philosophy Department at Cal State Long Beach. In 2008-2009 I was a Mellon Fellow in Philosophy at Cornell, and before that I held a postdoc at the University of Toronto. My PhD comes from the Philosophy Department at Indiana University, Bloomington, where I worked with the philosopher of biology Elisabeth Lloyd. Her primary appointment is in Indiana's History and Philosophy of Science Department, from which I also have an MA.
Click here for a letter to prospective graduate students.
My CV (Oct 2021) is here.
Area of Research Specialization
History and Philosophy of Science (esp Psychology)
Early Analytic Philosophy
American Pragmatism (esp James)
Other Areas of Teaching Competence
British Empiricism (17th – 19th C.)
Early Modern Philosophy
Theories of Perception
General Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Biology
Here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent introduction to philosophy class I taught (Phil 100).
And here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent graduate seminar in the history of analytic philosophy (Phil 681).
Area of Research Specialization
History and Philosophy of Science (esp Psychology)
Early Analytic Philosophy
American Pragmatism (esp James)
Other Areas of Teaching Competence
British Empiricism (17th – 19th C.)
Early Modern Philosophy
Theories of Perception
General Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Biology
Here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent introduction to philosophy class I taught (Phil 100).
And here is a complete set of teaching evaluations from a recent graduate seminar in the history of analytic philosophy (Phil 681).
Photograph: Natasha Calzatti
The background picture is a diagram of one of G. H. Lewes's physiological frog experiments, from Problems of Life and Mind, Second Series: The Physical Basis of Mind (London: Trübner & Co., 1877) p. 178.
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