WELCOME TO MY PROFILE PAGE
(click here for CV). I grew up in South Wales, with an English mother and a Welsh father (I speak Welsh fluently but as a second language). I studied Modern Languages at Merton College Oxford, followed by a DPhil on the work of Paul Celan, a German Jewish poet who wrote remarkable poems about the Holocaust, at Wolfson College Oxford. Life has taken me to many different places, and I have had the opportunity to teach at universities in Germany, Russia, Italy, USA and now China. I held the chair of Christian Doctrine at King's College London from 2004-2017, and currently hold a research chair in Ethics, Religion and Philosophy in the School of Philosophy at Renmin University of China, Beijing.
Throughout my career, I have had a continuing interest in how human beings work: how our lives are lived out through culture and language, and how these processes can be captured philosophically. I am today particularly interested in how cultures, including religious cultures, can shape our environment and even the structures that body forth our humanity. In recent years I have come to appreciate the contribution that contemporary science of the human can make to our self-understanding. This is work on the human which coincides with an increasing need for us - both East and West - to understand ourselves better, and especially to understand our social nature, under the pressures of globalization. With my background in Humanities, Religion, Philosophy and Contemporary Science, I find methodological questions about what the human is, and where we can identify it, to be quite compelling. More information about my work can be found on academia.edu.
Throughout my career, I have had a continuing interest in how human beings work: how our lives are lived out through culture and language, and how these processes can be captured philosophically. I am today particularly interested in how cultures, including religious cultures, can shape our environment and even the structures that body forth our humanity. In recent years I have come to appreciate the contribution that contemporary science of the human can make to our self-understanding. This is work on the human which coincides with an increasing need for us - both East and West - to understand ourselves better, and especially to understand our social nature, under the pressures of globalization. With my background in Humanities, Religion, Philosophy and Contemporary Science, I find methodological questions about what the human is, and where we can identify it, to be quite compelling. More information about my work can be found on academia.edu.
