Born and raised in New York, I finished my undergraduate degree as a study abroad student in St Andrews, Scotland where my maternal roots lie. I returned to New York to teach fourth grade in the Bronx for a year in order to fund my MPhil in Logic and Metaphysics. I then carried on my doctoral work in York, England. We (my wife, three boys and I) lived in England for over 20 years. Australia became our new home in 2013. I was appointed  Senior Professor of Philosophical Psychology at the University of Wollongong in 2014, as reppointed to that position twice since in 2018 and 2023. In 2026, I became the Chair Professor of Philosophical Psychology. Previously I worked at the University of Hertfordshire since 1993, where I served as Professor of Philosophical Psychology from 2002 and led the Philosophy unit from 1999 to 2005.

My research is a sustained attempt to understand human nature in a way which respects natural science but which nevertheless rejects the impersonal metaphysics of contemporary naturalism. My recent research focuses primarily on issues in philosophy of mind, psychology and cognitive science. I am best known for promoting thoroughly non-representational accounts of enactive and embodied cognition, and for having developed a hypothesis which claims that engaging with narratives, understood as public artefacts, plays a critical role in underpinning distinctively human forms of cognition.

Reaching beyond home discipline, I am often been invited to speak at conferences and expert meetings aimed at anthropologists, clinical psychiatrists/therapists, educationalists, narratologists, neuroscientists and psychologists.

I am called upon regularly to provide assessments for major research bodies accross the globe.  I have done so for the European Research Council (ERC); Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC, UK);  the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH, USA) and many other research bodies worldwide. Since migrating to Australia, I have served on the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts: at the end of my current tendure I will have done so for eight years, having also occasionally Chaired its Humanities and Creative Arts Panels.