Research

My research program

As a historian of philosophy, I’m interested in the relationship between metaphysics and physics during the Enlightenment. A century after Newton and Leibniz, it was a central preoccupation of the critical-period Kant. Between them, two of the figures most important to this question were Leonhard Euler and Émilie Du Châtelet.

As a philosopher of science, I’m interested in the methodology and epistemology of science and the conceptual basis of mechanics. After Newton and Leibniz, by far the most important figure working on mechanics was Euler. And one of the most influential writers on methodology and hypotheses was Émilie Du Châtelet.

No scholar has written on Euler at length, despite the fact that, on central philosophical issues of the Enlightenment, he was the most important figure working in the century between Newton (Principia, 1687) and the critical-period Kant (First Critique, 1781). My work aims to reveal how he indelibly shaped the metaphysics, epistemology, and the foundations of Enlightenment science. As for Du Châtelet, a new scholarship has blossomed in recent years, and I aim to broaden its scope by looking at a major, neglected text of hers, the Dissertation on the nature and propagation of fire, which I believe points to a need to rethink aspects of her philosophical evolution currently taken for granted in the literature. [A description of my post-doc research on the ENN website.]

In contemporary philosophy: I am interested in tracking early-modern debates and assumptions about metaphysics, science, and methodology to the present. One of these assumptions is the metaphysical validity of formal, mathematical reasoning (of the type I find emerges in the mid-18th century) in contemporary metaphysics of science. Another throughline to the present is “hypothetico-deductive” method and “confirmation theory” thinking in philosophy of science.

I also have a substantial project in social philosophy. Social movements are hugely important and highly visible forms of democratic expression. My guiding question is: how can movements be legitimate (which requires them to be egalitarian and democratic, or “horizontal” as is often said) and at the same time effective in producing social change (which seems to require hierarchies that violate egalitarianism)?