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My main areas of research are in Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Medieval Philosophy, and Metaphyiscs.
I am currently working on two papers on Leibniz: The first involves his views on God's freedom and the contingency of the world. In this paper I defend Leibniz's compatibilism and show that this view of God's freedom is consistent with holding that some other world might have been actual. The second paper involves Leibniz's views about worldmaking. Here I examine the relationship between harmony, compossibility, and expression. I argue that some recent accounts of these relations are inconsistent with genuinely possible worlds and offer my own interpretation.
I am working on one paper on Locke which is a reconstruction of his much maligned cosmological argument in Essay IV.x. Here I argue that a careful textual reading renders a better argument than previous commentators have attributed to Locke. I also examine the relationship between some of Locke's metaphyisical assumptions in the argument and those of Duns Scotus.
In philosophy of religion, I have recently completed a paper defending the theist from William Rowe's Principle B: If an omniscient being creates a world when there is a better world it could create, then it would be possible for there to be a being morally better than it. Against Rowe, I demonstrate that God can be morally unsurpassable by actualizing a plurality of worlds – a so-called “island universe.” This solution also solves the first optimalist problem since it entails that this world is not the best possible world but merely a morally acceptable or good world.
I have an ongoing project that involves trnaslating and evaluating Emilie du Châtelet's Institutions de Phyisque.
I have recently presented a paper examining her cosmological argument. Here I argue that, contrary to what most commentators have thought, her argument is not a retelling of Leibniz's argument, but is actually quite Lockean. |
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