Specialization:
-
Modern Philosophy
Education:
- PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research:
My research work is in the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, and focuses largely on issues in the metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion of the empiricist tradition.
Publications:
Books
Hobbes's Philosophy of Religion. Oxford University Press, 2023 (Honorable Mention in the Journal of the History of Philosophy 2024 Book Prize )
Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism. Oxford University Press, 2010
The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant. Oxford University Press, 2004
Selected Articles
“What Hume said to the Tortoise,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy (forthcoming)
“Bagehot on Belief,” Journal of the History of Philosophy (forthcoming)
“Hume on Chance, Probability, and Necessity,” Hume Studies 50 (2025), 131-161
"Consider the Oyster: The Bivalve Shellfish in Early Modern Metaphysics," History of Philosophy Quarterly 41 (2024), 291–303.
"Hume on Modal Discourse," in Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands, ed., Modality: A History (Oxford University Press, 2024), 148-170
"The Meaning of Philo's Reversal," Journal of the History of Philosophy 61 (2023), 215-235
“Berkeley on Inconceivability and Impossibility,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2019), 107-22
“Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016), 123-44
“Hobbes’s First Cause,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (2015), 647-67
“Hume’s Absolute Necessity,” Mind 123 (2014), 377-413
Office Hours: By appointment