Past Writing

Philosophy of History

From 1998 to 2012 I worked on the Philosophy of History, first as PhD student and then while lecturing at the Universities of Sheffield, Leeds, and Nottingham. Selected publications include the following (publisher or journal in brackets):

• 2008, Paper: Our relations with the past (Philosophia)
  The single paper that best expresses my ideas on the philosophy of history
• 2008, Book: The Philosophy of History: an Introduction (Continuum, now Bloomsbury)
  I'm proud to say that this is still in print and selling well over a decade on, and I continue to get great feedback from readers
• 2010, Paper: Counterfactual reasoning and method in historical geography (Journal of Historical Geography)
  I seemed to spend a lot of time thinking about counterfactuals in the humanities and social sciences; my conclusions are best presented in this paper
• 2003, PhD thesis and Book: Competing explanations: exclusion and importance in historical accounts (published 2009 by VDM, now OmniScriptum)
  The question of how we rank one explanation over another is both interesting and vital; I hope that my PhD research has contributed something to the debate
• I published a few reviews that I remain proud of: Aviezer Tucker's 'Our Knowledge of the Past' (2006, Philosophical Books), Jonathan Gorman's 'Historical Judgement' (2011, Mind), and Kerwin Lee Kline's 'From History to Theory' (2012, American Historical Review).

Essays and Short Stories

These pieces, all unpublished and to a greater or lesser degree unfinished, date from around 2010 to 2016.

• 2010: The Wars of the Roses
• 2011: What is Magic?
• 2012: Chinese Capers - a future history
• 2015 blog post: What is Rewilding?