Research Focus

I work on Kant, as well as some earlier philosophers who influenced Kant (like Leibniz, Spinoza, Crusius, and Newton) and later philosophers who are responding to Kant (like Schulze, Jacobi, Fichte, and Schopenhauer).

My Kant research has largely focused on (1) Kant’s metaphysics and epistemology (especially Kant’s views on space, motion, geometry, and laws of nature); (2) his relationship to his predecessors; (3) his philosophical methodology; and (4) issues pertaining to Kant’s transcendental psychology (especially Kant’s account of categorial synthesis and the respective roles of the understanding and sensibility).

I'm currently working on a book tentatively entitled Kant on the Metaphysics of Space, Nature, and God. The book offers a new reading of the content, development, and justification of Kant's surprisingly sophisticated metaphysics of space. (Everyone who has read Kant's transcendental Aesthetic knows that he thinks that space is an a priori form of intuition. But what has gone unnoticed is that this claim is just the tip of a much larger metaphysical iceberg and that major moves in the Aesthetic, as well as the Analytic, and Dialectic, depend for their meaning and justification on the hidden chunks). As the title suggests, the book also considers how Kant's views on space connect up with his shocking claim that affirming transcendental idealism is the only way to avoid Spinozism--which I take to mean, inter alia, a position that renders God spatial and undercuts the lawfulness and self-sufficiency of nature vis-a-vis God. On my reading, Kant's sees his metaphysics of space as the only way of preserving a transcendent non-spatial God, and a self-standing nature governed by a mixture of a posterior and a priori laws (including the sorts of laws Newton formulated in the Principia).

I'm have also recently completed (or am about to complete) a number of articles related to these ideas, such as article on Kant's arguments from Spinozism and an article on the grounding role of space in the Metaphysical Foundations.