General information (brief description)

Foci: Aesthetic Emotions

I completed my phd at the University of Nottingham in June 2007 under the supervision of Greg Currie. My thesis was called 'Shared Emotions in Music' and can be accessed here. I have now had three of its chapters accepted for publication and I hope ultimately to publish another two (one on my general theory of emotions and one on collective intentions) before I publish it altogether as a book. The overall argument of the thesis is that musicians can use music to share emotions in the radical sense that there is one mental state shared between two or more people. Though I don't talk about it in the thesis, I think this could be an existence proof against the scepticism of other minds.

In conjunction with Patrizia Lombardo, I am currently developing the aesthetic side of the philosophical interest in emotions. For 2007-2008 my main research focus was the sublime, which is initially characterised by the kind of (emotional) experience you have when looking at mountain landscapes, the starry sky, volcanoes, storms, deserts etc. --basically things deeply hostile to human life (of the huge and powerful variety) which we yet find highly attractive. One article that I am trying to publish analyses this connection between fear and attraction. Another examines the connection between the sublime and our idea of death, and discusses how the sense of the sublime may help one to overcome the fear of death.

During my time here I have also been working more generally on the emotions and the nature of character, as well as a general definition of aesthetic emotions. In the next year or so, I am planning with Didier Grandjean (psychology) and Wiebke Trost (neuroscience) to do some experiments in musical expression.

Finally I am beginning (as yet informally) a project to compose works of music expressive of emotions not typically found in abstract music. My first attempts (along with some other compositions) can be found on my myspace page here