Joe Cunningham

I'm an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. Previously, I held a number of teaching post at Nottingham and Oxford, and I was an Early Career Fellow at Warwick's Institute of Advanced Study. I completed my doctoral thesis entitled 'The Remit of Reasons' at Warwick in March 2016, written on the nature of rationalising explanation. I hold an MPhil.Stud from UCL (2008-2010) and a BA in Philosophy from Heythrop College, London (2005-2008).

My research focuses on how Anti-Individualism in the Philosophy of Mind can help shed light on problems in the theories of agency, normativity, and moral psychology. For example, in my doctoral work I develop a disjunctive account of responding to reasons, and I've put this to work in accounting for phenomena like normative achievement, rationality, and deviance problems in the philosophy of action. My recent work focuses on the nature of the ideal of authenticity: What it is, whether it's valuable, why it's valuable, what a true self is, and how it connects with freedom, autonomy, and agency. Again, I bring the Anti-Individualist framework to bear here. For example, I argue that our true selves are constructed by the adoption of higher-order attitudes of identification which one can instantiate only if the environment is a certain way.

Please follow the links above for more information on my research, teaching, and links to my publications. Here is a copy of my CV. If you'd like to get in touch, do drop me an email.