Christopher Oldfield

Curriculum Vitae

My professional life

I am an interdisciplinary philosopher specialising in metaphysics. I have held a range of teaching and research positions, e.g. at The Faraday Institute for Science Religion and the Faculty of Philosophy in the University of Cambridge, Fordham University, the University of Hertfordshire, King’s College London, St Mellitus College, the University of Oxford, and University College London. I also offer bespoke courses of 1:1 tuition and guidance on a wide range of subjects.

“Philosophy has many tasks, yet in our age the task of bracketing and seeing, of uncovering our forgotten sense of the cosmos, and of our lives therein, may be one of the most urgent."

— Erazim Kohák (1984) The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature, p.26; chapter 1: Theoria

Interests

My philosophical research addresses foundational questions in the logic and practice of scientific metaphysics. I have special interests in the history and interpretation(s) of “physicalism” and “naturalism” in the philosophy of mind. I’m interested in the metaphysics of the manifest image, and ways of attending to things unseen in the scientific image. I’m interested in the use of organicist principles to reconcile a constructive empiricist philosophy of the object of mathematical physics with a realist philosophy of the objects of perception.

“Vouloir faire tenir la nature dans la science, ce serait faire entrer le tout dans la partie”

— Henri Poincaré, Science et Méthode (1920, p.8; §1 Le Choix des Faits)

Motivations

I aspire to be a philosopher, a lover of wisdom and understanding. I once heard Brian Leftow say the love of wisdom can take the form of desire to understand what I do not yet, and delight to understand what little we can.

I grieve the poverty of public discourse at present, especially what passes for an understanding of the virtues (or the vices) of science and religion in our time. I aspire to promote a more literate experience, to remedy the wealth of myth-understandings at work, both inside and outside the philosophy room.

“…they suppose themselves to be above ‘metaphysics’ when in fact they are only a very little above it - being up to the neck in it.”

— Joseph Henry Woodger, Biological Principles (1929, p.246; II.V; §4)

I learned from James Ladyman, Bas van Fraassen, and Hans Halvorson to think of naturalism and empiricism as ways of asking ontological questions, not to be confused with an answer, or the only way of asking them. I learned from Peter Harrison, Alasdair MacIntyre and Maria Rosa Antognazza of the deep benefit to philosophy of the study of its history. I learned from Michael Friedman and Thomas Uebel that the physicalist manifesto of the Vienna Circle has been radically misunderstood; and from Janet Soskice, Peter van Inwagen and Merold Westphal how to think through confessions of faith, bewilderment and suspicion. I learned from Matthew Soteriou how much flows from the adoption of a temporal perspective, and how revisionary projects in metaphysics, well motivated in the service of descriptive projects, can quickly become unhinged.

Inspirations

Stock photograph of some magnificent Noctilucent Clouds. I once beheld something similar in the midnight sky on the Suffolk coast. Brighter than Venus it was. The evening was calm, the air so still, but for the smoke of the fire. We sat there, bewildered, between the embers and the stars.

“Better real confusion than false clarity; better real darkness than misleading light.”

— Fr. Thomas Hopko

Portfolio

Curicculum Vitae (PDF and online)
Photograph courtesy of 2022 workshop on Hylomorphism and Teleology at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

2022 Workshop on Nature’s Goals, Hylomorphism and Teleology at Corpus Christi College in the University of Cambridge. Photograph courtesy of the organisers.

  • Lecturer (Selected)

    • University of Hertfordshire
      Metaphysics 2024-25

    • University College London
      Science and Religion
      - New Atheism 2023-25
      - Darwinism 2024-25

    • St Mellitus College
      - New Atheism 2021-25

    • University of Oxford
      The Limits of Philosophy, Science and Religion (with Stephen Law, 2022)

    • Fordham University
      Philosophical Ethics, 2016-19

    Tutor (Cambridge)

    Teaching Assistant (London)

    • UCL
      History of Modern Science
      Philosophy of Science
      Science and Religion

    • KCL
      Philosophy of Physics
      Metaphysics
      Philosophy of Psychology
      Philosophy of Religion
      Philosophy of Mind

    • Why Middle Sized Matters to Science and Religion, William Simpson and I co-edited this special issue of Scientia et Fides, Vol. 13, No. 2 (October 2025). Our editorial together with seminal contributions from Barbara Drossel, George Ellis, Hans Halvorson, Robert Koons, Emily Qureshi-Hurst, and Howard Robinson (among others) is now available online here.

    • The Activity View
      Following van Fraassen’s (2002) rejection of the meta-philosophical ‘Principle Zero’, I am working to develop an alternative way of thinking about what is at stake in debates about a range of philosophical ``-isms” (like “naturalism”, “physicalism”, “scientism”, etc). The Activity View promises to explain why arguments for/against specific theses often serve to generate more heat than light, by identifying a profound but persistent meta-philosophical error. The error is to mistake the spirit of an activity for the content of a theory.

    • The Logic of the Special Composition Question(s)
      Following my doctoral research project at King’s College London in which I sought (quite unsuccessfully) to recover the categorical significance of the logic of the special composition question(s), I am trying to address an hitherto unaddressed puzzle about a life inside the ontology room: what counts as a life in the life sciences/science of life?

      TL/DR: The logic of the special composition question(s) has been lost in translation by a series of attempts to render it intelligible in higher order singular terms of a modal restriction Ψ(S) in virtue of which ‘a class, S has a fusion’. In his (2021) examiner’s report, Eric Olson praised my attention to detail, calling it ‘a great service’ to the field. What was evidently less clear to my examiners was the philosophical significance of this discovery.

  • Metaphysics

    • Categorical Dualism
      (Draft, Audio and Q+A from Oxford 2024)

    • Bound States and Living Organisms
      (Draft, Audio from Bristol 2023)

    • Pan-Psyche-Ism
      (Draft, Audio from Helsinki 2025)

    • When Are Fosters Parts?
      (Draft, Video from King’s 2024)

    • The Activity View of Physicalism
      (Draft, Abstract from Cambridge 2024)

    • Hylomorphism and the Inverse Special Composition Question (Draft, Video 2023)

    Science and Religion

    • “Modern Science Yes, Western Science No!” Needham’s World and the May 4th Movement (Draft from ESSAT 2026)

    • The Manifest Invalidity of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (Draft, 2026)

    • Myth-understanding Scientific Agency:
      the Tragedy of Scientism in a Secular Age
      (Draft, from ESSAT 2024)

    • The Attentional Stance
      (Draft, Audio from ISSR 2023

    • Naturalism without Content:
      Where Plantinga’s Conflict Actually Lies
      (Draft, Video from Krakow 2024)

    • Newman, Plantinga and Darwin’s Doubt (Draft, Slides from Warwick 2025)

    • Thinking with Assent,Living with Doubts: Questions as Modes of Holding Propositions (Handout from Newman House UCD 2024)

    • Natural Philosophy (OUP), by Alister McGrath, Science and Christian Belief: 36/1:147-9 (2023)

    • Inventing the Universe, by Alister McGrath, Science and Christian Belief 27/1 : 134-5 (2017)

    • Mind and Cosmos (OUP), by Thomas Nagel,
      Science and Christian Belief 28/2: 103-4 (2015)

  • Memberships

    • European Society for Science and Theology (2024- present)

    • British Society for the History of Philosophy (2023-present)

    • International Society for Science and Religion (2023-present)

    • British Society for the Philosophy of Science (2022-present)

    • Postdoctoral Society of Trinity College, Cambridge (2022-2024)

    Employment

    • Teaching Assistant, Department for Science and Technology Studies, University College London (2023-)

    • Research Associate, The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Cambridge (2021-)

    • Adjunct Professor, London Faculty for Teaching, Fordham University (2016-2019)

Testimonials

2024 presentation on Thinking with Assent while Living with Doubts at Newman House, University College Dublin Photograph courtesy of the organisers of Wittgenstein, Newman and Hinge Epistemology

“I am indebted to Christopher Oldfield of the Faraday Institute at the University of Cambridge for his illuminating grasp of the scientific, philosophical, and theological dimensions of reductionism.”

— Jeremy Begbie, Duke Divinity School and the University of Cambridge

“Rigorous, clearly explained technical concepts, always available and responsive to questions.”
“He’s great, absolutely wonderful. I think I want to take this subject for a Masters”
“Helpful, informative seminars, Chris went out of his way to help me when I was struggling”

— Anonymous KCL Staff and Student teaching evaluations (avg 4.6/5.0)

“I wanted to thank you for your time and instruction. Science and Religion is in my top 3 favourite courses I have ever taken and gave me much to ponder after every class. I really enjoyed our conversations and how much attention you put into your lectures.”

“I just wanted to let you know […] how much I enjoyed our weekly seminars. You made the conversations so informative, digestible, and interesting! Truly made me more interested in the course, I looked forward to it every week.”

— Unsolicited UCL student emails from the 2024 HPS/BASC programme

“A confession of bewilderment is not a presentation of an argument for the thesis that anyone else should be bewildered by whatever it is that the speaker finds bewildering.”

— Peter van Inwagen [2011] 2014 Relational vs Constituent Ontologies; in Existence: Essays on Ontology, p.210

How can we hope to make sense of progress in life, during periods of manifest political turmoil and material economic decline? I suspect that our ability to do this will require a measure of understanding of the understory of Jesus, unless of course Jesus was wrong, and our life does consists in the abundance of possessions.

To this end, and now with little lives to attend to, we are committed to live intentionally in a common home in London — where for various reasons, affordable, sustainable, communal, robust and resilient forms of life together have been disincentivised and made to imagine. In the words of Roberta Flack, these are tryin’ times. We hope to act in small ways, to contribute to the mycelial network of people learning to live this way. You can read about us here, here, here, or here, or listen to us here.

the understory / life together

“The image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but the entire world, reflected as in a drop of water”

— Andrei Tarkovsky (1986) Sculpting in Time, p.110

“Il faut cultiver notre jardin” - Voltaire. 2024 Photograph courtesy of Jude Aytoun (Passio). Vibes have been rumoured to include The Soil by David Benjamin Blower, The Garden by Bobby Mcferrin, A Garden Disciple by Willie Jennings, Praying by Mary Oliver, Staying Power by Jeanne Murray Walker, and occasional Beats In Abundance

Contact

2024 Symposium on Why Middle-Sized Matters for Science, Theology and Metaphysics, at All Souls College, in the University of Oxford. Photograph courtesy of the organisers.