Karen Detlefsen

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, its conceptual relation to the work of Leibniz and Newton, and her historical role in the emergence of modern science near the end of the eighteenth century; 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 and eighteenth centuries.