Brief biography:

I was born in the New Forest, Hampshire, and my family emigrated to New Zealand on the SS Southern Cross before my first birthday. My childhood was spent on Auckland's North Shore, where I attended Takapuna Grammar and later Auckland University. Eager to choose a lucrative career path, I double-majored in Philosophy and Art History.

After a stint in London in my early twenties, I moved to the US to attend graduate school at Princeton. My dissertation supervisor was Gil Harman (meaning that my academic genealogy can be traced back, through a long list of dead white men, to Galileo). Despite my finding the Ivy League life to be quite surreal, by the time I received my PhD (in 1998) the US was beginning to feel like home. My first lecturing job, however, turned out to be in the north of England. Over the next few years, while teaching at the University of Sheffield, I reworked my dissertation into my first book (The Myth of Morality) in between hiking in the Peak District and riding a paternoster.

I started my second book, The Evolution of Morality, in 2001, while on sabbatical in France (near Saignon). During this time I was offered a 5-year research fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra, so I quit my job in England and headed back Down Under. I discovered Canberra to be a city seemingly populated more by parrots than people (a point in its favor) and also a fine spot to have babies: my kids Max and Lucia were born there in 2003 and 2005. Another sabbatical in France (near Périgueux) was followed by a move to Sydney's northern beaches in 2008, when I began another research fellowship at the University of Sydney.

By this stage I was feeling quite settled in Australia, to such an extent that I became a citizen. Nevertheless, 2010 found me moving to New Zealand to take up a professorship at Victoria University of Wellington. Returning to Aotearoa hadn't particularly been part of the master plan, but the opportunity to give my kids a Kiwi childhood was too good to pass up. In windswept Wellington I eventually became a dog person (two terriers), took up gardening (NZ natives), and grew accustomed to earthquakes (somewhat). It turns out that the place suits me quite well; many years later, I'm still here.

[The birds shown on my homepage are all frequent visitors to my garden. They are: tūī, pīwakawaka, ruru, riroriro, kererū, and kākā.]