The short version.
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.
I write, paint, sometimes host a podcast, and occasionally disappear behind a pair of decks. Away from the desk you’ll usually find me on my allotment, battling the Cumbrian elements in pursuit of perfect fruit and veg.
The longer one.
I came to philosophy the slow way. My background is in sport and in how people get good at things: what actually happens when someone learns, what coaching does and doesn’t change, why so much of what we tell people about development turns out to be folklore. That work became a doctorate, then fifteen years of research and teaching, then a growing suspicion that the interesting questions weren’t the ones my discipline was equipped to ask.
The questions that kept surfacing were older than sport science or learning theory. What is a good life, and who decides? What do you owe the people who depend on you? What happens to a person when the thing they organised themselves around comes to an end? Sport asks all of these with unusual force, because it compresses a whole life into fifteen years and then hands it back.
Philosophy has a reputation for being abstract and a bit useless. I’d argue it’s neither, as long as you point it at the life you’re actually living rather than at a seminar room.
I also grew disillusioned with the transactional nature of university teaching and the direction higher education was going in general. So I left. Syntropise is what came of that: applied philosophy for people whose decisions carry public consequences and private weight. Founders, executives, elite coaches, and performers, mostly. People who can’t delegate the hard part.
One to one.
Most of my work happens through Syntropise. Alongside it I keep a small diary of one-to-one clients, and I’m protective of it, because it’s some of the best thinking I do.
It’s part coaching, part teaching, and part old-fashioned tutoring, and which of the three it looks like depends on the week and the person. Mostly what I do is introduce people to thinkers and ideas they would be unlikely to reach on their own, then work through them together, slowly, following whatever turns out to be interesting rather than whatever we planned to cover.
What it is not: a course, a framework, a reading list to get through, or coaching with philosophy sprinkled on top. There’s nothing to apply on Monday morning and no outcome to report. People come because thinking well about difficult things is one of the great pleasures available to an adult, and because it’s much better done with someone else.
- One to one, online or in person if you are near Cumbria.
- Usually fortnightly, usually ninety minutes, though people shape it to their own life.
- No minimum commitment. Some people stay a season, some have stayed years.
Elsewhere.
I write essays at Syntropology, chat about interesting ideas on Talk Doesn’t Cook Rice, and have three books either published or on the way. The peer-reviewed work is on ResearchGate, if that’s your kind of thing or you’re struggling to sleep.