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I am currently working on a project on the relation between the life
sciences and metaphysics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Specifically, I am tracing the evolution of the concepts of mechanism,
teleology, individuation, and laws in the metaphysics of Descartes, Malebranche,
Leibniz, Albrecht von Haller, and Caspar Friedrich Wolff as each tries
to explain the generation of new organisms.
I am also working on a number of papers on early modern women philosophers,
including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, and Émilie
Du Châtelet. These will culminate in three larger projects: one
on Cavendish's natural philosophy, its relation to her implicit political
philosophy, and the conceptual relation between her philosophy and that
of Hobbes and Spinoza; a second on Du Châtelet's natural philosophy
and its conceptual relation to the work of Leibniz and Newton; and a third
using the works of early modern women philosophers as a prism through
which to examine questions in the historiography of philosophy.
I have teaching interests in the Philosophy of Education, and will eventually
conduct research on early modern educational theories, including an investigation
of theories of women's education in the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries.
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“Explanation and Demonstration
in the Wolff-Haller Debate Surrounding
Generation.” In The Problem of Generation in Early Modern Philosophy:
From
Descartes to Kant, edited by Justin Smith. Series: Cambridge Studies
in
Philosophy and Biology, general editor Michael Ruse (forthcoming).
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“Supernaturalism,
Occasionalism, and Preformation in Malebranche.” Perspectives
on Science, 11 (4), Winter 2003, pp. 443-483.
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