Research

Publications

"Locke, Humboldt, and the Science of Color", in Locke and the Sciences, eds. Roberto Evangelista and Luisa Simonutti, Brepols (forthcoming) 

“Modern”, in the Routledge Handbook of Essence in Philosophy (eds. Kathrin Koslicki and Michael Raven), Routledge, 41-52 (2024)

"Modality and Essence in Early Modern Philosophy", in Modality: A Conceptual History (eds. Yitzhak Melamed and Samuel Newlands) Oxford University Press, 61-84 (2024)

"Locke's Aristotelian Theory of Quantity", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 107, 2: 337-356 (2023)

"Three Infinities in Early Modern Philosophy", Mind 128, 512: 1117-1147 (2019)

    - Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual as one of "the ten best articles published in philosophy" in 2019.

"The Allegedly Cartesian Roots of Spinoza's Metaphysics", Philosophers' Imprint 18, 21: 1-23 (2018)

"The Ontic and the Iterative: Descartes on the Infinite and the Indefinite", in Infinity in Early Modern Philosophy (eds. Ohad Nachtomy and Reed Winegar), Springer, 27-44 (2018).

"Substance and Independence in Descartes", Philosophical Review 125, 2: 155-204 (2016).

     - Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual as one of "the ten best articles published in philosophy" in 2016.

"Descartes' Argument for the Existence of the Idea of an Infinite Being", Journal of the History of Philosophy, 52, 3: 487-517 (2014).

    - Reprinted in The Philosopher's Annual as one of "the ten best articles published in philosophy" in 2014.

In Progress 

Ontic Infinity (book project, under contract with OUP)

• Ontic Infinity is a historical and philosophical investigation of an important, yet largely overlooked approach to infinity in seventeenth-century thought. While infinity is now commonly understood in relation to numbers or sets, several prominent early modern thinkers employed a notion of infinity connected to being or reality—accordingly, I call it ‘ontic’ infinity. It arose in response to the following question: in what sense is God infinite? Locke, Gassendi, Newton, and other empirically-minded scientists and philosophers in the period viewed divine infinity as simply another instance of the infinity of space, time, and number—in short, the infinity of quantities. But others—notably, Descartes and Leibniz—viewed divine infinity as a sui generis, non-quantitative type of infinity. The primary aim of Ontic Infinity is to explicate the latter view, to reveal how it is a genuine alternative to the former, quantitative approach, and to identify the reasons that led its proponents to adopt it.

"Non-Quantitative Infinity"