Hello! I’m a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, and I am thinking about the role that entropy plays from black holes to the direction of time. Before this, I was a postdoc on Al Wilson’s ERC-funded project FraMEPhys, and I am also an External Member of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.
Much of my research has focussed on the philosophical tangles surrounding thermal physics: the reductive relationship between thermodynamics and statistical mechanics, the nature of time-asymmetry and in what sense thermodynamics is objective.
I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge and my thesis, in part, considered how functionalism can help facilitate reductions. I am now thinking about the relationships between two types of reduction (roughly, ‘old theory to new theory’ reduction and ‘macro to micro’ reduction). Should we understand Newtonian mechanics as an old theory or a higher-level theory? If we think of it as higher-level theory, what does that mean for the status of e.g. Galilean spacetime?
I have also spent lots of time thinking about how a particular screening-off condition (‘conditional irrelevance’) can explain the autonomy of the special science, and form the backbone of an account of (weak) emergence. I am also interested in the philosophy of social sciences, social ontology and the philosophy of medicine.