I’ve found it fruitful to study human abilities through indirect approaches, for example, by studying human inabilities or weaknesses (e.g., akrasia/incontinence) and limit cases.

In the past, some of my research focused on medieval theories of incontinence. More recently I’ve investigated the possibility of ideal agents doing evil, as a test case with implications for the conception of free will more widely. This resulted in a book that provides a detailed account of the free will debate that arose in the wake of the Latin West’s rediscovery of Aristotle’s action theory. The book includes a discussion of medieval theories of how angels, who ex hypothesi act under ideal psychological conditions, can do evil (see www.cambridge.org/9781107155381).

For a better understanding of the context in which philosophical debates took place in the middle ages, I have become increasingly interested in “minor figures” – thinkers who have fallen into oblivion, although in their own time they stood at the centre of the debates. At the “Human Abilities” Centre, I am working on the theory of free will of John of Pouilly (early fourteenth century), a student of Godfrey of Fontaines and a contemporary of John Duns Scotus.