Being Well
A sporting life asks everything of you and then, one day, ends. This is what existential philosophy has to say about living that life well, on the field and long after you leave it.
Royalties go to the MND Association.
About me, then.
I’m not a huge fan of talking about myself, so the thought of a personal website is a bit cringe. But here we are.
I spent fifteen years in academia, researching how people learn, think, reflect, and develop judgement. These days I point philosophy at the life people are actually living, mostly through Syntropise, the practice I run with my friend David Priestley.
Away from the desk you’ll usually find me on my allotment, battling the Cumbrian elements in pursuit of perfect fruit and veg.
I’m less interested in giving people answers than in helping them see what their usual answers have been hiding.
Six ways I spend my time.
Syntropise
Applied philosophy for people whose decisions carry public consequences and private weight.
Syntropology
Notes and essays about what helps people and living systems come alive, or fall apart.
Published books
The ones with my name on the spine. I’m currently writing the sequel to The Syntropist.
Academic work
Fifteen years of research into how people learn, reflect, and develop judgement.
Talk Doesn’t Cook Rice
Conversations about concepts that rarely fit into a meeting agenda.
DJ mixes
When the thinking’s done, tunes. Not everything worth doing needs a thesis.
The books.
Two out in the world, one on its way.
The Syntropist
In a grey city run by a machine that has forgotten its own purpose, a seventeen-year-old tinkerer pulls a living seed from the guts of a dead pump. It asks her the question no one in Vithra has been allowed to ask for three hundred years: what do you want to become?
Royalties go to Hospice at Home.
The Clearing
A people who can no longer die have nothing left to risk, and whatever risks nothing has quietly stopped living. The second Vithra novel: the story of a man who must learn that a life which cannot end is not a life that has been saved.
Recent essays.
I write at Syntropology, about what helps people and living systems come alive, or fall apart.
A forgotten Hungarian philosopher on imagination as a faculty for perceiving what is really there, rather than a machine for making things up.
Read →
Two traditions, separated by two thousand years and half a world, arriving at strikingly similar conclusions about letting things be what they are.
Read →
What a biologist working on metabolism understood about change, and why becoming anything at all costs more energy than we tend to admit.
Read →One to one.
Most of my work happens through Syntropise. Alongside it I keep a small diary of one-to-one clients, which is part coaching, part teaching and part old-fashioned tutoring, depending on the week and the person.
I introduce people to thinkers and ideas they would be unlikely to reach on their own, and we work through them slowly. Nothing to apply on Monday morning, nothing to perform. Just the pleasure of thinking well about difficult things, which turns out to be reason enough.
Mixes.
When the thinking’s done, tunes. Not everything worth doing needs a thesis.
Memes.
Philosophy doesn’t have to be humourless. Drag the top one away, or just tap it.
