Research

My current research focus is on late 19th and early 20th-century philosophy (Bergson, Broad, Eddington, McTaggart, Oakeley, Sinclair, Stebbing) in France and Britain. My monograph on Henri Bergson has been published by Routledge and reviewed in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy and the Philosophical Quarterly. I have also previously published on the philosophy of religion, medieval philosophy, and the philosophy of time.

My work on Bergson’s influence on early 20th-century British philosophy has formed the background to my current research. I am looking at ways in which spiritualism and “psychical research” (i.e., the study of paranormal phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, or ghosts) influenced philosophy in Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. The first two pilot papers for this project (on C. D. Broad and Casimir Lewy) have been published in the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

Bergson’s philosophy was widely read in spiritualist circles, but he was not the only one interested in psychical research. These “spooky” topics captured major philosophical figures of the period.

My current project, heavily drawing on archival research, is investigating the ways through which this interest in psychical research influenced views about religion, time, causality, and free will in an interconnected network of philosophers in Britain between 1882 and 1971.