Originally from Northern Ireland, I am the author of A Philosophy of Belonging: Persons, Politics, and Cosmos (Notre Dame, IN: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2023) and The Differentiation of Authority: The Medieval Turn Toward Existence (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2012). I am also the editor of, and contributor to a book named, Human Dignity, Education, and Political Society: A Philosophical Defense of the Liberal Arts (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2020). I have numerous other publications as book chapters and in journals. Some links are posted on this site.

It is my great privilege to work as a professor of philosophy and I regularly teach courses on Medieval Philosophy, Political Philosophy, and Philosophy of Law, among other topics. I also teach philosophy in prison, one of the most rewarding settings for anyone engaged in philosophical discussion and genuinely liberal education.

My academic interests are loosely clustered around such contemporary thinkers as Eric Voegelin, Bernard Lonergan, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others. However, the span of philosophy from the ancients to our own day is one long, insightful conversation, and much of the value of contemporary thought is its dialogue with what has come before. Inevitably, the thoughts of Plato and Aristotle, or Augustine and Aquinas, remain present in later philosophy, and much of what I write is a grappling with what has come before.

It seems clear to me that the most adequate level for philosophical analysis in our own day is the level of the person. Rather than a sociological critique of power relations, it is the person who presents the deeper reality of experience and symbolization, of intelligence, reasoned affirmation, choice, and love. The person is the center where beauty, intelligibility, truth, and goodness motivate thinking, speaking, and acting.  It is the person who exists, not in solitude but as Relation (capitalized), who seeks the fulfillment of his or her own self-as-Relation in belonging. In the person lies the very possibility and condition of interpersonal relations, society, culture, and history.

So it is that a renewal of the times more properly begins, not at the level of society, but at the level of the person; or more properly said, renewal begins with one’s own self.

UnseenMeasure.com offers philosophical reflection at this level of the person, the person who is a self-already-in-Relation. It is intended as a site to host various writings on the deep dignity of being human, of existing as a person in a cosmos grounded in God.