Welcome to my personal website. Below are links to various other websites with which I am associated. (Sites for which I am responsible are shown underlined.)
Hertford College, Oxford
I am Gilbert Ryle Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford University, and also Reader in Early Modern Philosophy. For my main website there, please see Philosophy@Hertford, and for my work as PPE Coordinator, see PPE at Hertford College.
David Hume
The main focus of my research in recent years has been on philosophical issues arising from the work of David Hume, the greatest figure of the Scottish Enlightenment. From 2005 until 2010, I was Co-Editor of the journal Hume Studies. The website davidhume.org is a long-running project to make Hume's work accessible in authoritative electronic editions, together with high quality secondary material. Click here for links to my own publications on Hume, and also recordings of some public events.
During 2010-11, I have been spending a fair amount of time at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Edinburgh University, as their Illumni David Hume Fellow. The long-term target of some of this work is a multi-volume book project entitled Hume's Chief Argument. The short-term target – now up and running on www.davidhume.org – was an electronic edition of Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, presenting the original manuscript to the world for the first time (thanks to the good offices of the Royal Society of Edinburgh).
Computing and Philosophy
Initially almost by accident, computer programming has played a large part in my life, and I have come to appreciate its creative pleasures and its value for exploring novel ideas. The website PhiloComp.net brings together a wide range of resources relevant to the links between Philosophy and Computing, with the aim of promoting this vision, especially in education. In June 2010, these developments led to the approval of a new degree programme at Oxford University, in Computer Science and Philosophy, to admit students starting in 2012 (appropriately enough, the hundredth anniversary of Alan Turing's birth). This will be the first new Philosophy degree programme at Oxford for 39 years.
Online Lectures and Talks
Some of my Oxford First year General Philosophy lectures have recently been made available as podcasts on iTunes U.
An interview with Nigel Warburton can be found on the Philosophy Bites website or by clicking here: The Significance of David Hume.
