Personal Statement
As a philosopher, I am a generalist, which is a nice way of saying that I have done many different things and I am not really an expert on anything in particular. Most people would probably tag me as an ethicist, but this is only true in a very broad sense. Figuring out what is right and what is wrong, permissible or impermissible, does not hold much interest for me. It seems to me that when people are debating these questions they are actually arguing about something else, namely who we want to be and in what kind of world we want to live. For me, doing philosophy is ultimately a sustained attempt to get to grips with this "deeply puzzling world" (to borrow an expression of Mary Midgley's), to understand it and to understand our place in it. Philosophy is not business; it's personal, more akin to therapy than to science. It's about finding out what is actually going on and what we are doing here. Can philosophy provide an answer to these questions? I don't know. All we can do is keep on trying. Perhaps what matters is not that we find an answer, but that we keep the question alive.

Research Overview
Transhumanism and the Philosophy of Human Enhancement

Since 2007 I have been looking into current transhumanist philosophies, their key ideas, and the history of these ideas. Key transhumanist ideas are human self-design, the elimination of all suffering, the achievement of perfection and immortality, and the complete defeat of (human) nature. In order to understand these ideas better and to be able to evaluate them properly I have looked into their history, followed their development and identified their mythological status. The object was to gain clarity about what we as human beings are, what we want to, or ought to, become, and what technological advances are worth striving for. This strand of my research resulted in more than 15 papers and five books, 'Better Humans? Understanding the Enhancement Project' (2013), 'Sex and the Posthuman Condition' (2014), 'The Palgrave Handbook of Posthumanism in Film and Television' (ed., 2015), Mythologies of Transhumanism’ (2016), and ‘Moral Enhancement. Critical Perspectives’ (ed. with Lewis Coyne, 2018).


Life, Death, and Meaning

Since 2017 I have become increasingly interested in philosophical conceptions of meaningful living. I see my work on this as a natural extension of my previous work on human enhancement, which I thought people disagreed on mainly because they had very different ideas of what makes life worth living. This is particularly evident in the debate on radical life extension. Those in favour seem to think that as long as we have to die life is meaningless, while those against are inclined to think that, on the contrary, life would be meaningless if we did not have to die.

This prompted me to study more closely the work of some classic philosophers and writers who all, in their own particular way, struggled with the problem of finding meaning in a mortal world. My work on this resulted in my first book on the subject, published in 2019 under the title ‘The Meaning of Life and Death. Ten Classic Thinkers on the Ultimate Question’, followed by the edited collection ‘Death and Meaning’ in 2021, which resulted from a Royal Institute of Philosophy conference that I organised here at Liverpool the year before and which contains my paper “When Death Comes Too Late: Radical Life Extension and the Makropulos Case”.

Another conference I organised was the 6th International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life, which took place from 17 to 19 June 2024 at the University of Liverpool. The keynote speakers were Tatjana Schnell, James Tartaglia, and Kieran Setiya. This resulted in a collection of papers that I edited for the Journal of Philosophy of Life, published in January 2025.

Another book (‘Meaning in Life. A Subjectivist Account’), in which I provide a more systematic account of meaning in life and defend a subjectivist position (according to which living a meaningful life means experiencing one’s life as meaningful), was published in March 2025. I have tried to capture the core idea of this book in a poem that I wrote for the University of Liverpool Research in Verse Poetry Competition: “Digging for Truffles”.

My most recent and probably last book on meaning in life, published in December 2025 in the Routledge series Philosophical Dialogues on Contemporary Problems, is called ‘Philosophical Dialogues on the Meaning of Life.’ It features a series of fictional Socratic dialogues on meaning in life.

Also related to this project is my work on anti-natalism, which has resulted in a special issue of the Journal of Value Inquiry entitled “Would It Be Better if We Had Never Existed? David Benatar’s Anti-Natalism” that I edited with Oliver Hallich in 2022, which also contains my paper “Anti-Natalism, Pollyannaism, and Asymmetry: A Defence of Cheery Optimism”. My short story “Mother Knows Best” provides a rather gloomy commentary on moral enhancement and anti-natalism.

Currently I'm in the process of finishing a book on "Dead Bodies. What are they and how should they be treated", which will be published by Routledge in 2027.