Ashley Shaw is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He received his PhD from UCL in 2019. He works in the Philosophy of Mind and Action; in particular, on the nature of desire, rational agency, reasons for action, and how they are related. He is currently working on a book on the nature of desire in rational agents, as well as related projects on need, self-control, and self-knowledge of desire.

As a visitor at ECOM, his primary aim will be to finish a monograph provisionally titled Animal Desire: A Theory of Desire and Practical Rationality. This work pursues an interdisciplinary examination of various forms of desire and their contribution to rational agency. The account of desire draws extensively on research in behavioural psychology and cognitive neuroscience on reward learning and incentive motivational processes. Drawing on research in virtue-theoretic epistemology, this account of desire is nested into a framework that develops an account of our capacity to respond to reasons as a kind of competence. A central thesis is that desire rationalises action by determining some of our apparent reasons for action.

Mark Jary is currently a María Zambrano Research Fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Basque Studies in the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU). He is also Emeritus Professor in Linguistics and Philosophy at the University of Roehampton (London, UK), where he taught Linguistics and Philosophy of Language for over 20 years. He received his PhD in Linguistics from University College London and has written extensively on subjects relating to linguistic mood, speech acts and associated topics. As well as articles in journals such as Mind and Language and Linguistics and Philosophy, he has published three books: Assertion (Palgrave, 2010), Imperatives (CUP, 2014 – co-authored with Mikhail Kissine) and Nothing is Said (OUP, 2022).