Dr David Collins 

David Collins is the Rubinoff Early-Career Research Fellow in Art as a Source of Knowledge at Churchill College, Cambridge. He specialises in philosophical aesthetics, along with other areas of philosophy including ethics and moral psychology and topics in philosophy of mind, especially imagination, emotion, and perception. He is also a specialist in the philosophy of R. G. Collingwood, with additional interests in thinkers including Henri Bergson, William James, John Dewey, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and Roger Scruton. His work often synthesizes ideas from thinkers from different historical eras and philosophical traditions, such as pragmatism or phenomenology, to offer new perspectives on issues discussed in current (broadly analytic) philosophy.

He earned a PhD in philosophy from McGill University in Montreal in 2021, preceded by an MA in philosophy from Ryerson University in Toronto in 2014. He came to philosophy from both a practical and academic background in film, with a BFA (film production) and an MFA (screenwriting) from York University in Toronto, having written and directed short films and independent theatre productions and having taught film at Sheridan College in Ontario. Most recently he held a two-year postdoctoral research position at the University of Oxford’s faculty of philosophy, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

His current work primarily focuses on developing an updated expression theory of art that accounts for both the nature and the value of art (including social, moral, and cognitive value) in terms of art’s capacity for ‘perspectival sharing.’ Planned secondary projects include re-examining the notion of ‘virtue aesthetics’ in line with the Aristotelian virtue ethical tradition, and a reading of Beauvoir’s moral writings as offering a kind of virtue ethics.

David is active in a number of scholarly organisations, serving as Membership and Communications Secretary for the Canadian Society for Aesthetics and as Programme Coordinator for the Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture (EPTC). He is also a co-investigator on the international research project Aesthetic Education through Narrative Art and its Relation to the Humanities, based at the University of Rijeka.

Publications

Edited Volumes

• Interpreting R.G. Collingwood: Critical Essays, co-edited with Christopher Williams, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.
• Perspectives on Trust in the History of Philosophy, co-edited with Iris Vidmar Jovanović and Mark Alfano, Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books (2023).
• The Moral Psychology of Trust, co-edited with Iris Vidmar Jovanović and Mark Alfano, Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books (2023).

Peer-reviewed Articles

• “Good Art as a Civilizing Enterprise: Collingwood against Mass Corruption of Consciousness,” forthcoming in Human Affairs.
• “Expanding Davies’ Pragmatic Constraint: A Pragmatist Principle for Philosophizing about Art,” forthcoming in Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics.
• “Imagining the Author: Historical Understanding and the Cognitive Value of Art,” Philosophia (2023), online: DOI 10.1007/s11406-023-00698-x.
• “Romantic and Post-Romantic Conceptions of Artistic Expression: From Kant to Collingwood,” Bloomsbury History of Modern Aesthetics Library (2023), online: DOI 10.5040/9781350893009.008.
• “Davies and Levinson on the Musical Expression of Emotion: What’s the Problem?” Croatian Journal of Philosophy 21, no. 1 (2021): 71-92.
• “The Other Academic Dishonesty: Why Grade Inflation is Ethically Wrong,” Canadian Journal of Practical Philosophy 4 (2020): 1-24.
• “Aesthetic Possibilities of Cinematic Improvisation,” Croatian Journal of Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2019): 269-295.
• “Expressing a Certain Vision: James, Collingwood, and the Value of Artistic Pursuits,” Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics 5 (2013): 193-205.

Book Chapters

• “R.G. Collingwood: Aesthetics,” forthcoming in The Palgrave Handbook of British Idealism, edited by James Connelly and Stamatoula Panagakou, Palgrave-Macmillan.
• “Articulating the Visible: Collingwood and Merleau-Ponty on Expression in Painting,” forthcoming in The Expression of Emotion in the Visual Arts, edited by Vanessa Brassey and Derek Matravers, Routledge.
• “Was Collingwood a Process Philosopher? Libellus de Generatione’s Ontology of Becoming,” forthcoming in Interpreting R.G. Collingwood: Critical Essays, edited by David Collins and Christopher Williams, Cambridge University Press.
• “Trust in the Artist and the Audience: Aesthetic Virtue and the Hermeneutics of Faith,” co-authored with Iris Vidmar Jovanović, in The Moral Psychology of Trust, edited by David Collins, Iris Vidmar Jovanović, and Mark Alfano, 313-332, Rowman & Littlefield/Lexington Books (2023).
• “Two or Three Incompatibilities between Art and Technology,” in Social and Technological Aspects of Art, edited by Iris Vidmar Jovanović and Valentina Marianna Stupnik, University of Rijeka Press (2022).
• “The Importance of Imagination/Phantasia for the Moral Psychology of Virtue Ethics,” in Imagination and Art: Explorations in Contemporary Theory, edited by Keith Moser and Ananta Sukla, 174-205, Brill (2020).