"Everything good is on the highway. The middle region of our being is the temperate zone. We may climb into the thin and cold realm of pure geometry and lifeless science, or sink into that of sensation. Between these extremes is the equator of life, of thought, of spirit, of poetry - a narrow belt." Emerson

I have special interests in the history of thought and literature and conceptions of philosophy as a way of life.  I have authored ten books and edited & co-edited a further ten books. Several of the books have been translated, including editions in Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, and Turkish. 

Nietzsche's Earthbound Wisdom. The Philosopher, the Poet, and the Sage was published by Chicago University Press in spring 2025. In the book I set out to recover Nietzsche’s love for a philosophy that guides us through our passions and opens us more fully to the possibilities of life and the joy of knowledge. I illuminate Nietzsche on philosophical cheerfulness; the intellectual virtue of honesty and the passion of knowledge; the philosopher as a wanderer or spiritual nomad; the passions; the poets; and on philosophy as intellectual vision and perception. I offer close readings of Nietzsche’s texts in conversation with philosophical and literary figures including Augustine, Baudelaire, Carlyle, Dostoevsky, Emerson, Flaubert, Stendhal, and more. I probe Nietzsche’s critique of literary naturalism and his alternative conception of the poet as seer who has a deep longing for a new earth.

I am now completing a book of essays with the working title Philosophy and the Wisdom of Life. Ways of Living, Ways of Seeing. The book takes its initial inspiration from Schopenhauer and his ‘aphorisms on the wisdom of life’ and utilises a range of thinkers, including Bergson, Emerson, Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Marie Guyau, Nietzsche, and Santayana.