A varied undergraduate career at Lincoln College, Oxford started with an entrance scholarship in Mathematics and ended with a degree in Philosophy and Theology (1980). I then remained there for the BPhil in Philosophy (1982), working on philosophical logic, philosophy of religion, and the work of David Hume. A temporary post in Glasgow was followed in 1985 by appointment to Leeds as Lecturer in Computing and Philosophy, then Senior Lecturer in 1995. In these interdisciplinary roles I specialised in fostering links between Computing and the Humanities, especially through a number of large teaching initiatives and the establishment of the Leeds Electronic Text Centre. Meanwhile I acquired a research MSc in Computing, and a PhD in Philosophy (on "Hume, Induction and Probability"). My teaching over this period included programming, software engineering, artificial intelligence, general IT, logic and discrete mathematics, as well as philosophy. I also developed a number of software systems for administration and teaching, including SPARCS (which has been used since 2000 to classify most undergraduate degrees in Leeds) and four educational software systems (Elizabeth, Turtle Java, Turtle Pascal, Signature) that were designed originally to support teaching at Leeds, and are now available free from www.philocomp.net.
In 2005 I was appointed Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Hertford College, Oxford, though I remain consultant Director of the Leeds Electronic Text Centre, also building links with activities at Oxford.
The main focus of my philosophical research is on David Hume, and I am currently Co-Editor of the international journal Hume Studies. Recent publications include Reading Hume on Human Understanding (OUP, 2002), a new edition of Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (OUP, 2007) and various papers on Hume and related topics, most of which can be found at www.davidhume.org. I have also recently published on the philosophy of religion, most notably a paper in Mind 2004 on Anselm's Ontological Argument.