Hello and welcome! My name is Michael, and I am a philosopher. Currently I’m based at Western University in London, ON as a Post-doctoral Fellow with the Extending New Narratives in the History of Philosophy project.

I work at the intersection of history and philosophy of science, especially 18th century physics, and early modern philosophy.

My dissertation (abstract here) is a reading of Leonhard Euler’s natural philosophy as a contribution to the philosophy of science and to early modern thought. On many central philosophical issues of the Enlightenment, Euler is the most important figure working in the century between Newton (Principia, 1687) and the critical-period Kant (First Critique, 1781). In spite of this, no philosopher has written on Euler at length. I seek to change this, by revealing the many ways he indelibly shaped the metaphysics and epistemology of Enlightenment science.

I am particularly interested in the evolution of causal concepts in connection to mechanics, in Enlightenment-era shifts in norms of explanation and inquiry, and in recovering important, non-canonical voices in the history of philosophy. This last bit also informs my teaching.

Check out my Research section for more about my post-doc project, publications, and works in progress.

You can reach me at mveldma7@uwo.ca