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I am a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford, where for three years I will be looking at legal and medical assessments of decision-making capacity, how they misfire for the neurodivergent and cognitively disabled, and how this should inform philosophical accounts of agency and autonomy. I will focus on a series of five case studies drawing particularly on medical and legal contexts where the questions of capacity are so central and so impactful. My aim is to contest common philosophical presuppositions about the nature of agency and decision-making which have come to cloud practical determinations of capacity that adversely impact the treatment of some of the most vulnerable members of society. One key anticipated conclusion is that I will argue against the common temptation to view decision-making as a wholly inner power, which is on occasion undermined by external influences. Instead, we need to understand the ways in which our capacities for decision-making are partly constituted by environmental factors, and, most significantly, aspects of an agent’s social environment.

In 2022, I finished my PhD at the University of Sussex, supervised by Professors Andy Clark and Sarah Sawyer, and funded by CHASE. In my thesis, I primarily considered the questions of why we have the concepts mind and mental, what they refer to, and whether or not we should keep them. I argue that using them does more harm than good, and that we should abandon them, in favour of more fine-grained concepts better suited to the phenomena under discussion.

My work is primarily concerned with topics in the philosophy of mind, psychiatry, psychology, and cognitive science. My methodology draws on a mix of ‘practical turn’ philosophy of science and ‘linguistic turn’ analytic philosophy. However, as relevant, I make regular forays into the history of these disciplines, animal ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of language, feminist philosophy, and occasionally the history of philosophy.