Research

I am a Historian of Early Modern Philosophy. My primary research focus is the thought of seventeenth century philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish, but my research broadly concerns issues related to materialism, perception, and philosophy of mind in that period.

My CV is available here (last updated online January 2025).

Current Work

As of Fall 2025, I am working on the following: 1) an edition of Margaret Cavendish's Philosophical and Physical Opinions (in contract with Hackett); and 2) a chapter on Hobbes's Dialogus physicus.

Recent Work

My monograph Hobbes’s Two Sciences: Politics, Geometry, and the Structure of Philosophy is published with Oxford University Press (more information here). The book provides a new understanding of the unity of Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy by situating his politics within his account of scientific knowledge as constructed by humans—an epistemology founded on the idea that makers have special access to causal knowledge—and by demonstrating that the relationship between pure and mixed mathematics provided him with a model for thinking about relationships between geometry and natural philosophy and between politics and history. In short, the book articulates Hobbes's answer to a question that still matters today: Can politics be scientific?

Popular Philosophy

PHILOSOPHY seems to me to be amongst humans now, in the same manner as corn and wine are said to have been in the world in ancient time. (Hobbes, De Corpore I.1)

I’m sympathetic to Hobbes’s claim above that, like the science of agriculture cultivates naturally-growing plants such as corn and grapes, the goal of philosophical activity is to cultivate common sense through reflection, often resulting in refinement.

To that end, some years ago I co-edited a collection of essays on whiskey, both thinking about whiskey and thinking about how whiskey enjoyment can impact our thinking. The result, Whiskey and Philosophy (published by Wiley-Blackwell in 2009 and still in print with Turner Publishing), was a collection of chapters on themes such as the history and culture of whiskey, the beauty and experience of whiskey, metaphysical, epistemological, and ethical aspects of whiskey production and consumption, and reflection on the places where whiskey is made and enjoyed. The book recently made it to audible.com.

The book includes reviews of different whiskeys and some cocktail recipes. If you’ve made it this far in this description: yes, the spelling is ‘whiskey’ and not ‘whisky’ (reasons detailed in the introduction to the book). This was perhaps the most fun I’ve ever had on an academic project!