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Specialization:
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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
“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