Philosophy occupies a somewhat different place in my scholarship from fields such as law, taxation, theology or linguistics. I have undertaken some formal philosophical study, particularly in ancient Greek philosophy, but I do not present myself as a conventionally trained professional philosopher. Rather, sustained engagement with philosophy has become necessary to almost every major strand of my interdisciplinary work.
Questions that initially appeared to concern taxation, economic behaviour, Chinese institutions, sociology, law or theology repeatedly led beneath the immediate disciplinary problem to more fundamental questions. What is a human being? What constitutes the good? Is the individual conceptually prior to society, or is human identity inherently relational? What is property? Why should private ownership generate particular rights? What makes political authority legitimate? Is economic behaviour fundamentally material and individual, or socially constituted? Can reason be separated from tradition, language and culture? What does it mean to know something? How does language relate to reality? What remains of human life when explanations are reduced to material interests?
My philosophical work has increasingly involved questioning assumptions inherited from the European Enlightenment that have become so deeply embedded within modern law, economics and politics that they can appear to be neutral descriptions of reality rather than historically particular philosophical positions.
This has brought Western philosophy into conversation with Greek philosophy, Christianity, Chinese thought, sociology, psychology, linguistics and my empirical research into institutions and societies.
Philosophical Formation
My philosophical education has developed principally through interdisciplinary scholarship rather than a degree specifically in philosophy.
My studies of economics and law necessarily involved ideas concerning individual autonomy, property, markets, rationality and the relationship between individual and state. My Asian Studies education introduced a very different intellectual environment, including Chinese philosophical traditions and Marxism. Sociology subsequently challenged individualistic accounts of human behaviour, while psychology raised questions concerning cognition, sociality and the biological foundations of human nature.
My theological education required sustained engagement with Greek philosophy, Hellenistic thought, patristic philosophy and philosophical anthropology. I have also undertaken specific study in ancient Greek philosophy through the University of Athens, together with further courses concerned with Luther and the development of Western thought, Kierkegaard and intellectual humility.
Beyond formal coursework, I have read extensively in Western philosophy and have undertaken particularly sustained research into Plato, Neoplatonism, Wittgenstein and the philosophical traditions underlying modern political and economic institutions.
Philosophy consequently functions in my work less as a separate compartment than as a level of analysis underlying the other disciplines in which I work.
Plato
Plato has become one of the most important philosophers in my intellectual development.
My interest extends beyond particular Platonic doctrines to the larger philosophical world that Plato represents. I am interested in his account of reality, knowledge, reason, moral formation, the soul, the good and the relationship between the individual and the political community.
I am particularly interested in the extent to which Plato has been incompletely received in later Western thought. Reading Plato principally through propositions extracted from his dialogues can obscure the character of the philosophical project itself. The dialogue form, the importance of dialectic, the relationship between knowledge and moral transformation, and the persistent movement from the immediately apparent towards a reality that cannot simply be reduced to material objects are all significant.
Plato therefore provides a powerful point from which to reconsider assumptions that became increasingly dominant in modern Western thought.
The individual in Plato is not simply an autonomous preference-producing unit. Reason is concerned with discovering the good rather than merely identifying efficient means of satisfying existing desires. Knowledge has a moral dimension. Political order cannot finally be separated from questions about what human beings are and what constitutes human flourishing.
These ideas continue to challenge some of the philosophical assumptions underlying modern economics, law and political thought.
Platonism, Christianity and the Greek Intellectual Tradition
My theological work has considerably deepened my engagement with Plato because Greek Christianity developed within an intellectual world already profoundly affected by Platonism.
I am interested in this relationship in both directions.
Christianity cannot simply be described as Platonism given a Christian vocabulary. Its Jewish scriptural foundations, understanding of creation, incarnation, history and the person of Christ distinguish it profoundly from pagan philosophical systems. At the same time, Christian thinkers used, criticised and transformed concepts derived from the Greek philosophical world.
The interaction is especially important in the Greek Fathers.
My work on Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor repeatedly encounters questions with philosophical dimensions: the nature of the human person, participation, freedom, desire, the relationship between material and intelligible reality, the nature of the good and the ultimate purpose of human existence.
This has led me to resist accounts in which Greek philosophy and Christianity are treated as independent intellectual worlds that merely collided. Their interaction produced something historically and philosophically more complicated.
Neoplatonism
I have undertaken extensive research into Neoplatonism and its relationship with both earlier Greek philosophy and Christian thought.
Neoplatonism interests me partly because it demonstrates how misleading a simple narrative of “ancient philosophy” followed by “Christian theology” can be. Late antique philosophy and Christianity developed alongside one another and addressed many overlapping questions, even while giving importantly different answers.
The Neoplatonic concern with unity, participation, hierarchy, intellect, the relation between multiplicity and oneness, and the movement of created or derivative reality towards its source became enormously influential.
Its importance also extends beyond Byzantium. Greek philosophical ideas travelled through Christian, Islamic and later Western intellectual traditions in complex ways.
This provides an important background to my interest in how intellectual traditions are transmitted, partially lost, rediscovered and transformed.
Paul, the Fathers and Philosophical Anthropology
My theological research has increasingly developed into philosophical anthropology.
My Master’s research on Paul asks questions that are simultaneously theological and philosophical: what is the relationship between reason, desire and action? Can a person recognise the good yet fail to perform it? What survives of moral cognition when human nature is damaged? What constitutes freedom and responsibility?
Paul’s language cannot be understood without some engagement with the philosophical environment of the ancient Mediterranean world. Greek philosophers had already developed sophisticated accounts of internal moral conflict, reason, passion and the divided person.
My work therefore brings Pauline anthropology into conversation with Plato, Stoicism, Hellenistic Judaism and later patristic thought.
The Greek Fathers develop these questions further. In Gregory of Nyssa and Maximus the Confessor, questions concerning human nature, freedom, desire and the good become part of a much larger account of what humanity is and what it might become.
These traditions offer an important alternative to accounts of the person constructed primarily around autonomous individual choice.
Christ and the Universal Human Community
An important philosophical dimension of my engagement with Christianity concerns the movement beyond tribal or narrowly bounded conceptions of human community.
I am interested in Christ’s teaching as a profound challenge to attempts to confine moral obligation within kinship, ethnicity or political community. The neighbour, the stranger and even the enemy become morally significant.
Paul develops this universalising trajectory in a different intellectual setting.
This does not require denying the importance of human social relationships. Indeed, one of my criticisms of modern individualism is precisely its tendency to underestimate kinship and community. The more difficult philosophical problem is how genuine communities can exist without making moral worth dependent upon membership of them.
Christian universalism provides one historically important response to that problem.
Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi
My China scholarship introduced me to a philosophical tradition that developed largely independently of the Greek and later Western traditions.
Confucius, Mencius and Xunzi have been particularly important to my thinking about human sociality and institutions.
Confucian thought begins from a conception of human beings embedded in relationships. Family, social role, obligation, ritual, education and moral cultivation are not peripheral restrictions imposed upon an otherwise complete autonomous individual. They are part of the process through which a person becomes a particular kind of human being.
Mencius and Xunzi provide importantly different accounts of human dispositions and moral development, but both take seriously the need to explain how human beings become capable of participation in an ordered social world.
My empirical research into Chinese families, guanxi and social institutions made these philosophical questions unusually concrete. Chinese social organisation demonstrated the limitations of assuming that the autonomous individual of some Western economic and legal models constitutes a culturally neutral starting point for analysing human behaviour.
I do not treat Confucian philosophy as a simple explanation for contemporary Chinese behaviour. Rather, it provides another sophisticated intellectual tradition through which assumptions about individuals, relationships, obligation and government can be examined comparatively.
Philosophy of the Market, Property and the Individual
My professional work in taxation, law and economics has required sustained engagement with the philosophical foundations of markets and private property.
Modern economic and legal systems contain assumptions about the individual, ownership, contract, exchange and state authority that developed through a particular intellectual history.
Private property can appear so foundational to modern legal systems that its philosophical character disappears. Yet claims concerning ownership necessarily involve questions about the relationship between individuals and resources, the exclusion of others, inheritance, accumulated wealth and the legitimate authority of the state to redistribute resources.
Taxation makes these philosophical questions particularly visible.
To describe taxation simply as the state taking a person’s pre-existing property already assumes a particular account of property and the relationship between individual and political community. Conversely, treating property as entirely created by the state risks ignoring the claims individuals can possess against political power.
My work therefore repeatedly encounters the tension between individual rights, social institutions and collective claims.
Locke and Enlightenment Individualism
John Locke is particularly important to my critical engagement with modernity because of his influence on later conceptions of the individual, property and political authority.
I am interested in the extraordinary productivity of the intellectual transformation associated with the Enlightenment while remaining critical of some of its assumptions.
The autonomous individual can be an immensely powerful normative idea. It provides intellectual resources against inherited hierarchy, arbitrary authority and constraints imposed merely by birth.
The difficulty arises when a normative claim about individual freedom becomes an empirical theory of what human beings actually are.
My sociological and psychological work has made me increasingly sceptical of models in which society appears to be something subsequently constructed by already formed individuals. Human beings develop within relationships. Language itself is social. Identity, knowledge, moral categories and even the capacity to conceptualise individual autonomy are acquired within social environments.
This does not eliminate the individual. It changes the philosophical problem.
Freedom must be understood for creatures who are simultaneously individual persons and inherently social beings.
Marx and the Materialist Challenge
My engagement with Marxism began substantially through my study of Chinese politics and political economy.
Marx provides a powerful critique of the claim that liberal institutions can be understood independently of underlying economic power. His attention to class, ownership, material interests and the historical character of economic institutions remains intellectually significant.
My work on wealth, oligarchy, state capture and institutional power continues to encounter questions that Marx placed near the centre of social analysis.
At the same time, I have become deeply critical of the reductionist tendencies of Marxist thought.
Material relationships cannot adequately explain the whole of human social existence. Kinship, religion, language, culture, identity, affection, moral obligation and historical memory are not simply superficial expressions of underlying economic relations.
My research into Chinese social institutions made this especially apparent. Families and social networks could not be adequately explained as products of class position or material self-interest.
I am also interested in the consequences of treating inherited culture and social institutions principally as structures of domination to be overcome. Social institutions can certainly embody domination, but they are also among the principal means through which human beings create trust, identity, cooperation, belonging and meaning.
My critique of Marx therefore converges with my critique of liberal individualism at an unexpected point: both can underestimate the independent importance of social relationships, culture and historically formed communities.
Individualism, Materialism and Human Sociality
A central philosophical theme running through my work is resistance to accounts of human beings that are excessively individualistic or materialist.
This conclusion emerged gradually from several directions.
My China research showed individuals acting through families, guanxi and networks. Sociology supplied theoretical frameworks for understanding socially embedded behaviour. Psychology reinforced the biological and developmental importance of human sociality. Linguistics demonstrated that even the systems through which individuals formulate and communicate thoughts are collectively inherited. History revealed the persistence of institutions across generations. Theology provided a much older account of human beings whose ultimate fulfilment is relational rather than isolated.
These different disciplines do not prove one philosophical doctrine. They do, however, make a radically atomised conception of humanity increasingly difficult to sustain.
One of my broader philosophical interests is therefore the possibility of developing an account of the human person that protects individuality and freedom without imagining that the person exists conceptually or developmentally before relationship, language, culture and community.
Irish Christianity and an Alternative Western Tradition
My research into Irish and Scottish history has led me to an additional strand of Western intellectual development that I believe deserves greater attention.
The early Irish Christian tradition, including figures such as Columba, emerged at the intersection of Christianity, Gaelic society and the wider intellectual world of late antiquity and the early medieval period.
I am interested in the extent to which later accounts of “Western thought” can become excessively continental and retrospective, making intellectual developments that eventually became dominant appear inevitable.
Irish Christianity represents one reminder that the Latin Christian West contained multiple intellectual and institutional possibilities.
This interest eventually connects with one of the thinkers I find particularly remarkable: John Scottus Eriugena.
Eriugena
Eriugena occupies an unusually important position in my understanding of medieval Western intellectual history.
His familiarity with Greek Christian scholarship and his engagement with thinkers such as Gregory of Nyssa and Pseudo-Dionysius distinguish him within the Latin West.
He provides evidence that the division between Greek East and Latin West was never as intellectually complete as later narratives can imply.
Eriugena also complicates any simple account in which ancient Greek thought disappeared from Western Europe and was subsequently rediscovered during the Renaissance.
I am particularly interested in intellectual transmission across these supposed boundaries: what Greek material remained available, through whom it travelled, how it was interpreted and why particular strands subsequently became marginal.
Constantinople, Greek Scholarship and the Renaissance
This interest extends into the relationship between Byzantium and the Renaissance.
I am interested in the movement of Greek texts, scholars and intellectual traditions into Western Europe before and around the fall of Constantinople and in how this contributed to changing Western engagement with classical philosophy.
I approach the connection cautiously rather than reducing the Renaissance to a single event in 1453. Greek-Western intellectual exchange substantially predates the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople.
Nevertheless, the preservation of Greek scholarship in Byzantium and its movement westward form an important part of the intellectual history of Renaissance Europe.
This again challenges historical narratives that treat Byzantine thought as peripheral to the development of European philosophy.
Reformation and Calvin
The Reformation is another important point of intersection between my historical, theological, sociological and philosophical work.
I have undertaken particular research into Calvinism and its influence in Scotland, Ulster and subsequently North America.
My interest in Calvin is partly theological but also concerns philosophical anthropology and social order.
I am critical of aspects of the Calvinist tradition that, in my reading, intensify certain Old Testament models of collective identity, covenant and moral discipline in ways that can sit uneasily with the universalising trajectory I identify in Christianity.
This becomes particularly interesting when theology moves into social institutions.
Calvinism was not merely a collection of propositions about salvation. In particular historical settings it contributed to forms of community organisation, moral discipline, literacy, political thought and understandings of individual and collective responsibility.
My interest therefore lies partly in how theological anthropology becomes social philosophy and eventually institutional practice.
Spinoza
Spinoza interests me as a thinker who participates in the intellectual transformation of early modern Europe without fitting comfortably into a simple story of Enlightenment individualism and materialism.
His treatment of God, nature, reason, freedom and human affect retains a metaphysical depth that distinguishes him from more reductive accounts of modern rationality.
I am particularly interested in thinkers such as Spinoza who occupy intellectual boundaries.
They reveal that the transition from medieval to modern thought was not a straightforward movement from religious mystery towards secular rationalism. Alternative modernities remained possible, combining rigorous reason with radically different understandings of reality.
Kierkegaard
Søren Kierkegaard provides another important challenge to overly simple accounts of modernity.
I have undertaken specific study of Kierkegaard and have continued to engage with his work.
His insistence upon the lived individual might initially appear to align him with modern individualism. Yet his individual is very different from the autonomous utility-maximising actor of economic abstraction.
Kierkegaard’s individual confronts anxiety, responsibility, faith, uncertainty and existence.
He therefore preserves something that highly systematised accounts of both rationality and society can lose: the irreducibility of lived human existence.
His work is particularly relevant to my interest in the limits of systems. Intellectual frameworks are necessary, but a complete conceptual system should not be confused with the reality it attempts to describe.
Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein has become particularly important to my thinking about language, meaning and intellectual method.
My engagement with linguistics and legal interpretation makes his work especially relevant.
The later Wittgenstein’s insistence that meaning is bound to use challenges attempts to imagine language as a transparent set of labels attached to independently existing concepts. Language operates through practices, conventions and forms of life.
This has profound implications beyond linguistics.
Law depends upon language. Theology depends upon language. Social institutions depend upon shared concepts. Even philosophical problems can sometimes arise because language is being removed from the practices within which it ordinarily possesses meaning.
Wittgenstein therefore connects directly with my work on legal interpretation, Natural Semantic Metalanguage, intercultural communication and institutional context.
There is also an important parallel with my broader scholarship. Just as a legal institution cannot necessarily be understood independently of the society in which it operates, a linguistic expression cannot necessarily be understood independently of the practices within which it has meaning.
Philosophy of Language
My formal linguistic training has made philosophy of language increasingly important to my work.
Questions of meaning are unavoidable in statutory interpretation, treaty interpretation, translation and comparative law.
My research involving Natural Semantic Metalanguage asks whether complex concepts can be decomposed into more fundamental semantic components and what this might contribute to legal interpretation.
My work on poetry and statutory interpretation similarly examines the interpretative act itself.
Translation makes the philosophical problem particularly visible. If two languages organise semantic space differently, translation cannot always consist of substituting equivalent labels. Interpretation becomes unavoidable.
This has implications for my China research, theology and historical scholarship as well as law.
Intellectual Humility
Another philosophical theme that has become increasingly important to me is intellectual humility.
I have undertaken specific study in this area, but it also reflects my experience of interdisciplinary scholarship.
Moving seriously between disciplines makes the limits of any single explanatory system particularly apparent. Economics reveals things that sociology can overlook; sociology exposes assumptions hidden within economics; psychology adds another level; history demonstrates that supposedly universal institutions have histories; linguistics complicates assumptions about meaning; theology asks questions that material explanations may exclude in advance.
Intellectual humility does not require abandoning the possibility of knowledge. It requires recognising the distinction between reality and the particular conceptual apparatus through which we are presently attempting to understand it.
This is one reason I am attracted to thinkers who preserve some sense of mystery rather than treating what cannot be incorporated into their system as necessarily unreal.
Critique of Enlightenment Thought
A major theme emerging from my interdisciplinary work is a critical reassessment of the Enlightenment intellectual settlement.
I do not understand this as a rejection of the Enlightenment.
Individual liberty, rational criticism, legal equality, scientific inquiry and constraints upon arbitrary authority represent enormous achievements. My own work in law and rule of law depends heavily upon this inheritance.
My concern is with turning historically situated philosophical insights into an exhaustive anthropology.
The autonomous individual, rational self-interest, material incentives and private property can provide powerful analytical tools without providing a complete account of human beings.
My work increasingly asks what was excluded when these concepts became dominant.
Kinship matters. Social belonging matters. Culture matters. Religion matters. Language matters. History matters. Human beings seek meaning as well as material welfare. They form attachments that cannot sensibly be reduced to transactions. They inherit institutions before they choose them and depend upon other people before they can conceive themselves as autonomous individuals.
The challenge is therefore not to retreat from modernity but to construct a richer account of human beings within it.
Philosophy Across My Scholarship
Philosophy provides one of the principal means through which the different parts of my academic work connect.
Taxation raises questions about property, justice and the relationship between individual and state. Political economy raises questions about power, freedom and material interests. Sociology raises the problem of the relationship between individual and society. Psychology asks what kind of biological and cognitive creature the human person is. Linguistics raises questions about meaning and the social character of thought. History asks how inherited ideas continue to structure the present. Theology confronts questions of ultimate reality, human purpose and the good.
China Studies provides an especially important comparative challenge because it prevents Western philosophical assumptions from being mistaken too easily for universal ones.
The encounter among Confucian social thought, Marxism, liberal economics and Chinese social institutions has repeatedly forced me to reconsider assumptions embedded within Western law and economics.
Philosophy is therefore not an ornamental addition to my interdisciplinary scholarship. It is frequently the point at which apparently separate disciplinary questions reveal that they depend upon the same underlying assumptions.
My Work in Philosophy
I would not describe myself as a professional philosopher in the narrow disciplinary sense. My formal qualifications and principal academic appointments lie elsewhere.
Nevertheless, philosophy constitutes a substantial and mature strand of my intellectual work.
I have undertaken formal study of ancient Greek philosophy and other philosophical subjects, read extensively in Western philosophy and engaged particularly deeply with Plato, Neoplatonism, Confucian philosophy, Christian and patristic thought, Eriugena, Enlightenment philosophy, Locke, Marx, Spinoza, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein.
More importantly, philosophical analysis runs throughout my research in law, taxation, political economy, sociology, psychology, theology, linguistics, history and China Studies.
The distinctive perspective emerging from this work is neither a simple rejection of modern Western thought nor an attempt to recover an idealised pre-modern world. It is an attempt to examine assumptions that have become invisible through familiarity.
I am particularly interested in the conception of the human being that lies beneath our institutions. Much modern thought has gained enormous analytical power by abstracting the individual from relationships, history and culture. But an abstraction that is useful for one purpose can become misleading when mistaken for a complete account of reality.
Plato, Confucius, Paul, the Greek Fathers, Eriugena, Spinoza, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein, despite the enormous differences among them, each provide resources for questioning aspects of that reduction.
The philosophical question connecting much of my work is therefore:
How can we understand the human person in a way that preserves freedom, reason and individuality without reducing human beings to isolated material actors or ignoring the relationships, language, culture, history, moral experience and search for meaning through which human life actually becomes possible?
