Early Modern Philosophy

History of modern philosophy, especially, Leibniz and the German Enlightenment (Wolff, Lambert, Kant), epistemology, and metaphysics.

I work on the history of modern philosophy, especially Kant, and on the history of aesthetics. I have worked on Kant's epistemology and metaphysics, his moral and political theory, and on his aesthetics, and on issues in both epistemology and aesthetics in a wide range of other authors. I am also one of the General Co-Editors of the Cambridge Edition of Kant, for which I have translated several volumes of Kant's works. My recent works include the first English translation of an extensive selection of Kant's posthumous Notes and Fragments (2005), a survey of Kant, called simple Kant (2006), a Reader's Guide to Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2007), and three collections of my essays, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (2005), Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (2005), and Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (2008). I am currently working on a history of modern aesthetics from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, tentatively entitled Truth and Play. Beyond that, I am planning to write a book on the impact of Kant's moral philosophy on the subsequent history of philosophy.

In addition to teaching all areas of Kant on a regular rotation, I teach a rotation of courses on eighteenth-, nineteenth-. and twentieth-century aesthetics.  I also teach eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. 

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.