Some more bits about me
I studied for the B.A. in Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Merton College, Oxford, graduating in 1967. My main interest was in philosophy (much stimulated by my tutor, John Lucas). I then moved to Linacre College to do the two-year B. Phil degree (later renamed M. Phil) in Philosophy, supervised by Rom Harré.
In January 1970 I started work in the Philosophy Department at the University of Lancaster, having spent the autumn of 1969 as a visiting assistant professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Nevada in Reno. I stayed at Lancaster for 24 years, with a few months away in 1982 as a visiting fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU in Canberra, and likewise in 1990 at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
In January 1994 I took up the Chair of Political Theory in the Politics Department at Edinburgh, where I later became the first Head of the new School of Social and Political Science. I retired from the University in 2006, becoming an Emeritus Professor, and continued with some teaching and supervision in the School for several years.
After retiring in 2006 I continued with the research on ethics and markets that I had started a few years previously, and which had itself followed on from a long period of work on market boundaries that began while I was at Lancaster. But since around 2015 I have also been working on some quite different research, focused on the archives of Monstrous Regiment (1975-1993), the leading feminist theatre company which was co-founded by my partner, Mary McCusker.
The digitalised material from these archives - held in the V&A's Theatre and Performance collection in London, and including much of the music from the shows - has been used to create a website that records and celebrates the company's history and achievement. The website was launched in 2019.