Early Modern Experimental Philosophy
I started researching this topic as part of a team at Otago and am now working on it as the principal investigator of the AHRC-funded research grant ‘experimental philosophy and empirical ethics’. The project aims to improve our understanding of early modern experimental philosophy and to assess the viability the methodological outlook underpinning early modern and recent attempts to build an empirical science of ethics. My current research focuses on the metaphysical and theological assumptions of seventeenth-century experimental natural philosophers and on eighteenth-century attempts to apply the methods of early modern experimental philosophy to ethics.
Peter Anstey and I have co-authored a companion chapter on early modern philosophy and an essay on its origins. We are writing a monograph on early modern experimental philosophy and the origins of the notion of empiricism. My papers on Guglielmini, Montanari, Wolff’s relation to experimental philosophy, and Kant’s views on experiment are related to this project.
Methods, History, and Teaching of the History of Philosophy
As regards the methods of philosophical historiography, I am especially interested in the issues raised by the employment of the tools of analytic philosophy in the reconstruction of the thought of past philosophers. I am co-editing a collection of essays on ancient philosophy and analytic philosophy with Catherine Rowett.
My research on the history of philosophical historiography focuses on the standard narrative of early modern thought based on the contrast between Descartes’, Spinoza’s, and Leibniz’s rationalism and Locke’s, Berkeley’s, and Hume’s empiricism. I have discussed pre-Kantian notions of empiric and empiricism, Kant’s relation to the narrative, and its spreading in the English-speaking world. I reconstruct the origins of the narrative in the third part of a monograph that I am co-authoring with Peter Anstey.
As regards the teaching of the history of philosophy, I have guest-edited a symposium on new ways of teaching early modern survey courses.
Kant on Concepts
In a monograph and three papers, I reconstruct and discuss Kant’s abstractionist account of concept formation. On my account, Kant holds that it is possible to perceive objects without employing concepts. I explain how, given those perceptions, we can form categories and empirical concepts. I argue that Kant has the resources to rebut many of the objections raised by psychologists and philosophers against abstractionist theories. I also argue that, given two widespread notions of innateness, Kant’s categories are innate concepts and Kant’s views on their origin are remarkably similar to Leibniz’s views on the origin of intellectual ideas.
Kant on Truth
This project aims to provide a reconstruction and a critical discussion of Kant’s conception of truth. I argue for three main claims. First, Kant conceives of truth along the lines of a correspondence theory. Second, the study of Kant’s case shows that an idealist can consistently endorse a correspondence theory of truth. Third, Kant regards his combination of a correspondence view of truth with idealism as an antidote to a form of scepticism: the thesis that we cannot know which cognitions of objects in space and time are true.
I have published papers on Kant’s views on the definition of truth, the relation between the notions of truth, object, and actuality, the nature of truth-bearers, the existential import of categorical sentences, Kant’s response to a sceptical argument, and the claim that Kant endorsed a coherence theory of truth. I plan to integrate these and other materials into a monograph.