Tom McClelland
Biography
I recently joined HPS after three years at the Faculty of Philosophy. Before that I held posts at the universities of Warwick, Manchester and Glasgow and studied at the universities of Sussex, York and Cambridge. My research covers a range of overlapping topics in philosophy of cognitive science, metaphysics, aesthetics and applied ethics. My introductory book What is Philosophy of Mind? is available from Polity Press. I'm currently focussing on the concept of affordances for mental action. Long-standing work in philosophy and psychology suggests that we see our environment in terms of the bodily actions we can perform in it e.g. you might perceive a teapot as affording gripping. I suggest we also see our environment in terms of the mental actions available to us. That is, you might perceive affordances to attend, to imagine, to deliberate etc.
