BIO
Originally from the industrial city of Wolverhampton, in the English Midlands, I'm a first-generation academic at the University of California, Irvine, where I am Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the interdisciplinary Center for Knowledge, Technology & Society. I was previously Professor of Philosophy and Director of the interdisciplinary Eidyn research centre at the University of Edinburgh. I mostly work in epistemology, and have written on many topics in this field, including radical skepticism, theory of knowledge, virtue epistemology, modal epistemology, epistemic luck/risk, social epistemology, understanding, inquiry, know-how, and so on. I'm also interested in topics that explore epistemological ideas in particular domains, such as law, education, religion, healthcare, and cognitive science. Relatedly, I've been involved with a number of projects in applied philosophy, such as bringing the teaching of philosophy into Scottish prisons, exploring the role of extended cognition in special needs education, and incorporating the intellectual virtues into the heart of the UCI curriculum. I've also done a lot of MOOCs, most recently this one.
Some career highlights: I've won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for my research in philosophy, I've been elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and I've delivered the annual Soochow Lectures in Philosophy (which were subsequently published as the book Epistemic Angst by Princeton University Press, the cover of which is on the right).
I'm the Editor-in-Chief of Oxford University Press's Oxford Bibliographies: Philosophy and the co-Editor-in-Chief (and co-Founder) of the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism.
