I am a Senior Lecturer in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University (ANU) and a member of the ANU Centre for Consciousness. I also co-edit the Philosophy Across Borders book series at Oxford University Press with Nilanjin Das, Amy Olberding and Evan Thompson. Before coming to ANU, I was an Assistant Professor at Marquette University. I studied philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne, received a masters from the University of Sydney and doctoral degree from the University of Auckland. 

I work in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of mind in both mainstream and Indian Buddhist philosophical traditions. Some of my current research projects include:

Fear, anxiety and their social regulation: An interdisciplinary study

Funded by an Australian Research Council Early Career Discovery Award (DECRA), I am currently writing an interdisciplinary book aimed at creating dialogue between Indian Buddhist philosophy and emotion research about the nature of fear, anxiety, and their cognitive and social regulation (my research page contains links to some early publications from this project).

Madhyamaka Buddhist Ethics

I am a co-author of Moonshadows: Conventional Truth and Buddhist Philosophy (Oxford 2011). This book explores Madhyamaka positions on the Buddhist doctrine of two truths - ultimate and conventional. In this book and subsequent publications I critically examine the meta-ethical implications of Madhyamaka (2011, 2015, 2018).

Buddhist Ethics and Moral Epistemology

I am interested in Buddhist ethics, meta-ethics, moral psychology and moral epistemology. I raise issues concerning ethical agency when Buddhist ethics is contextualised in Pramanavada Buddhist epistemology (2010) and in dialogue with classical Chinese Confucianism and Daoism (2011a, 2011b). I explore the role of karma and moral responsibility in Buddhist ethics (2022), and engage the more general issue of how Buddhist ethics might dialogue with mainstream normative ethics (2017). I am also interested in Buddhist arguments about the moral status of animals and vegetarianism (2017), and am currently co-editing a book with Geoff Barstow on Buddhism and Animal Ethics.

Buddhist Philosophy of Mind and Pragmatism in Dialogue with Science

I have broad interests in Buddhist philosophy of mind. I explore Buddhist arguments for idealism (2018) and for the reflexive self-awareness of consciousness (2018). I critically discuss the limits and possibilities of interdisciplinary engagement between Buddhism and science (2021), and explore the potential of treating the Buddhist commitment to karma and rebirth as a pragmatically "useful fiction" (forthcoming). I also have a forthcoming piece demonstrating that the Buddha anticipates Pascal's Wager in several important respects and likely provides the first textual evidence of dominance reasoning (forthcoming).

Skillful Coping and Ethical Agency (and some Ancient Greek Philosophy)

I have long-standing interests in spontaneous and non-deliberatively appropriate or ethical action. I co-authored a popular paper with Koji Tanaka on spontaneous action in martial arts (2010). My doctoral research also critically examined Aristotle's concept of phronesis in dialogue with contemporary debates about practical intelligence in skilled virtuous action, and a key chapter was published in (2018).