My research is mainly in the history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century philosophy, centering on the metaphysics and philosophy of science of the period. Publications include The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant (Oxford, 2004) (http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-926326-4), which presents a critical study of the early modern debate over the paradoxes of material structure, and covers issues to do with the ontology of parts and wholes, composition, atomism, and infinite divisibility. Other areas of research interest include the seventeenth-century controversies over the authority and bounds of reason, political philosophy, and the philosophical history of atheism. Philosophical heroes: Aristotle, Montaigne, Bayle, Hume, Walter Shandy, Russell, and Quine.

Selected Bibliography

BOOKS

• The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant (Oxford University Press, 2004).

ARTICLES

• “Infinite Divisibility and Actual Parts in Hume’s Treatise,” Hume Studies, 28, 2002, pp. 3-25.
• “Bayle and the Case for Actual Parts,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42, 2004, pp. 145-64.
• "Hume on Religious Affect," Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (forthcoming).
• "Religion and Moral Prohibition in Hume's 'Of Suicide'," Hume Studies, 31, 2005, pp. 189-210.
• "Robert Boyle on Things above Reason," British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 15, 2007, pp. 283-312.

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