Embodiment and being
Living beings are not passive matter but self-maintaining, purposive bodies of activity. Agency, meaning and value begin in embodied life itself.
01 · Philosophy
Embodiment,
agency, value
A philosophy of embodiment and being: what living bodies are, how agency and meaning arise, and what follows morally from taking embodied life seriously.
Embodiment. Objectification.
The recurring problem
We give priority to the products of living activity – from identities and ideologies to genes and machines – rather than to the living beings from which they arise.
The philosophical project
Life before abstraction
At the heart of my work is the idea that living beings are not passive matter but self-maintaining, purposive bodies of activity. Drawing from a close reading of Aristotle, I argue that agency, meaning and value begin in embodied life itself, rather than existing only in human minds or in the abstract.
A recurring problem in human culture is our tendency to give priority to things produced by living activity, from identities to ideologies, genes to machines, rather than the living beings from which they arise. My work examines why we make this move, how it is connected to mortality and our discomfort with our animality, and how it shapes our treatment of animals, environments, technologies and one another.
I argue for an account of life that restores embodiment, vulnerability, agency and purposiveness to how we think about ourselves and the world.
Philosophy & ethics
13 entriesWork in progress
Body Horror: Why We Dream of Being More Than Matter
A philosophy of embodiment for the age of AI, asking why agency, mind and experience appear only in living bodies while dominant theories treat the body as secondary to thought and feeling. It traces the history of body-denial and argues that intelligence arises through the energetic labour by which organisms maintain themselves, ending with an ethics of embodied flourishing.
Academic volume
Forthcoming
Clowning around with Elephants
A chapter for Bloomsbury's Animal Humor, co-written with Joyce Poole, on elephant life, play, comedy and the philosophical stakes of taking animal subjectivity seriously.
Chapter
2026
Careful Dignity: A Promising Foundation for Our Relations with Nonhuman Animals
A chapter for Feminist Dream Labs: Practices for Caring Through Crises, placing animal dignity within feminist and posthuman questions of care.
Chapter
2024
What scale of nature should we prioritise in bioethics?
A multispecies approach to bioethics, connecting human health with the health of other animals, ecological communities and the wider environment.
Nuffield Council
2023
Animal Dignity: Philosophical Reflections on Non-Human Existence
The first philosophy book devoted to animal dignity, with a foreword by Jane Goodall. Editor, and author of the opening and closing chapters, 'Beginning with Dignity' and 'Ways Forward'.
Edited volume
2023
By Our Own Design: The Science of Agency and the Meaning of Life
On organisms as agents: how purposive activity, meaning and value arise within living processes rather than being imposed on life from outside.
Essay
2023
Unlearning Human Exceptionalism
A philosophical response to Eileen Crist on human exceptionalism, solidarity with animals, and the psychology of objectification.
Forum essay
2022
Heaven is feral
On the doubt humans are taught about the rich and meaningful lives of other animals, and an ethical world animated by their bodies, minds and agency.
RSPCA essay
2022
The myth of value-free science
On the responsibilities of knowledge-making, and whether science can be separated from the societies and living worlds affected by its claims.
Essay
2022
On Death and Love
A philosophical essay on mortality, human exceptionalism, the longing to outrun the body, and whether that longing hinders the capacity to love.
Essay
2021
The joy of being animal
On embodiment, animality and the philosophical muddle created by the story that humans are not really their bodies.
Aeon
2021
The myth of human exceptionalism
On the animal condition, human self-aggrandisement, technology and the failure of exceptionalist accounts of personhood.
IAI News
2020
Reassessing the Three Rs?
An examination of replacement, reduction and refinement in animal research, and the moral tensions sharpened by research during a global health emergency.
Hastings Center Report
Scholarship & practice
A route into philosophy
I did not train as a philosopher, but came to philosophy over time through independent scholarship in the history and philosophy of science, latterly the philosophy of biology, and through practical work in ethics.
I have spent time working on these questions as a Visiting Fellow in Durham University’s Philosophy Department and at the Hannah Arendt Center, also as a Visiting Fellow. I have also been an affiliate at the Hastings Center for bioethics in the United States.
My practical ethics work includes membership of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics from 2019, serving as Deputy Co-Chair and co-chairing its Environment and Health priority area. As a Vice President of the RSPCA, I support its work on the welfare and status of other animals, with a particular interest in bringing philosophical questions about animal lives and agency back into the organisation.