My approach:

Contemporary philosophy is characterized by a trend towards hyper-specialization. As a result, there is not much communication between philosophers working in different fields and traditions, nor is there much overlap between historical and systematic perspectives on philosophical questions. I favour a “Big-Picture” approach to philosophy. This means that I try to connect seemingly unrelated debates by identifying shared metaphysical and epistemological problems they try to solve, and by consequently developing uniform solution strategies.

For example, in my monograph Ineffability and Its Metaphysics: The Unspeakable in Art, Religion, and Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), I develop a uniform metaphysical account of ineffability, a phenomenon that has fascinated and puzzled philosophers from Laozi to Wittgenstein, by drawing on a range of debates from contemporary metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind.

The guiding question:

My research is in theoretical philosophy, and one question holds it together across the subfields: if reality contains domains that lie beyond empirical observation, how do we gain epistemic access to them, how do we articulate what we grasp there, and how do we justify our ontological commitments to them? The three aspects belong to epistemology, the philosophy of language, and metaphysics. Access and justification can be studied most precisely in the philosophy of mathematics, where the objects are unobservable but the claim to objectivity is rarely disputed; questions of articulation arise more sharply in aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, where it is contested in what form non-empirical insight can be expressed at all. I therefore work by comparing domains, testing arguments developed in one field for their weight in the others.

Current projects:

Understanding beyond Language

A five-year programme on the epistemology of understanding, and the basis of my application to the DFG Heisenberg Programme (submitted in August 2026). Since its revival, the epistemology of understanding has been organized propositionally: to understand X is taken to be to grasp a set of propositions about X. I argue that some states of understanding contain an element that no set of propositions captures – the element against which our attempts to put the understood into words are measured. Three subprojects test this claim for first-personal, mathematical, and interpersonal understanding.

E Pluribus Unum. Finding Objectivity in the Mathematical Multiverse

A three-year DFG–AHRC joint project with Mary Leng (University of York). Currently under review; the decision is expected in November 2026. The project addresses a dilemma for Platonists who accept mathematical pluralism: how can one and the same proposition – the Continuum Hypothesis, say – be true in one region of an ontologically robust mathematical cosmos and false in another, without the position collapsing into incoherence or trivial relativism?

Recent work:

‘Mathematics and the Limits of Language’ (2025, in R. Gaskin, The Question of Linguistic Idealism, OUP)

Philosophers who hold that thought does not outrun language usually treat mathematics as the hardest case for the opposite view, on the grounds that mathematical content is fully formalizable. I argue that even mathematical understanding has cases in which cognition is not exhausted by what can be stated propositionally, and that recognizing this does not require abandoning the objectivity of mathematics.

‘Mathematical Pluralism and Indispensability’ (2024, Erkenntnis)

Set-theoretic pluralism is the view that there is not one mathematical universe but many mutually incompatible yet equally legitimate ones. I argue that this puts both the classical and the extended indispensability argument under pressure, because no Platonism about a mathematical multiverse can be justified on the basis of scientific applications.

‘Mathematical and Moral Disagreement’ (2020, The Philosophical Quarterly)

The existence of fundamental moral disagreements is a central problem for moral realism and has often been contrasted with the alleged absence of disagreement in mathematics. Recently, however, it has been pointed out that mathematicians do in fact disagree, e.g. on which set-theoretic axioms are true, and that this increases the plausibility of moral vis-à-vis mathematical realism. I argue that the analogy between mathematical and moral disagreement is not as straightforward as those arguments present it. In particular, I argue that mathematical disagreements are compatible with mathematical realism in a way in which moral disagreements and moral realism are not.

‘Modal Structuralism and Theism’ (2018, in F. Ellis, New Models of Religious Understanding, OUP)

Drawing an analogy between modal structuralism about mathematics and theism, I offer a structuralist account that implicitly defines theism in terms of three basic relations: logical and metaphysical priority, and epistemic superiority. On this view, statements like ‘God is omniscient’ have a hypothetical and a categorical component. The hypothetical component provides a translation pattern according to which statements in theistic language are converted into statements of second-order modal logic. The categorical component asserts the logical possibility of the theism structure on the basis of uncontroversial facts about the physical world. This structuralist reading of theism preserves objective truth-values for theistic statements while remaining neutral on the question of ontology.

‘Access Problems and Explanatory Overkill’ (2017, Philosophical Studies)

I argue that recent attempts to use evolutionary data in order to dispel the problem of epistemic access for realism about a priori domains such as mathematics, ethics, and modality result in two kinds of explanatory overkill: (1) the problem of epistemic access is trivially solved for theism as well as a number of objectionable ‘realisms’, and (2) realist belief becomes viciously immune to arguments from dispensability, and to non-rebutting counter-arguments more generally.

Earlier project:

Mathematical Analogies (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, grant no. 846522, 2019–2022) asked whether mathematics can serve as a guide in our efforts to understand other a priori domains of philosophy, such as ethics, aesthetics, modality, or religion.