My research reconstructs the early history of analytic philosophy in part by putting G. E. Moore back at the center of a wider Cambridge story—one that interweaves 19th century formulations and approaches to ethics, logic, psychology, with the development of philosophy of mind and language throughout the 20th century and beyond.

My areas of specialization are early analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind.  In my most recent book The Metaphysical Basis of Ethics: G. E. Moore and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy, I draw on extensive archival materials to trace Moore’s philosophical development in the 1890s, from his early Cambridge Tripos instruction in “mental science” to the ethical and metaphysical positions culminating in Principia Ethica. The book argues that Moore’s early theory of judgment and his anti-psychologism grew out of a distinctive Cambridge context (Stout, Ward, Sidgwick) as much as from responses to Bradley or Frege, thereby reframing the account of evolution of analytic philosophy. With Thomas Baldwin, I co-edited G. E. Moore: Early Philosophical Writings, which brought Moore’s fellowship dissertations (1897–98) into print with a substantial scholarly introduction. This edition supplies the primary sources on which my historical reinterpretation relies and provides the context for examining Moore’s break with (and debts to) late-19th-century traditions.

My earlier work in philosophy of mind and language, and its technical foundations, considered core questions about externalism, semantic content, explanation, analyticity, and psychological causation. These earlier papers were instrumental in leading me from concerns in contemporary mind and language concerning the nature of a proposition and propositional constituents to the related issues that emerged in my work on Moore.