History of modern philosophy, especially, Leibniz and the German Enlightenment (Wolff, Lambert, Kant), epistemology, and metaphysics.

• History of Modern Philosophy
• Philosophy of Psychology
• Theories of Vision
• Philosophy of Science

• Kant
• Modern Philosophy
• Aesthetics

I work on the history of modern philosophy, especially Kant, and on the history of aesthetics. I have worked on Kant's epistemology and metaphysics, his moral and political theory, and on his aesthetics, and on issues in both epistemology and aesthetics in a wide range of other authors. I am also one of the General Co-Editors of the Cambridge Edition of Kant, for which I translated three volumes of Kant's works.  Thirteen volumes of this edition have been published and two more are in press as of September, 2011; only one remains to be completed. My recent works include the first English translation of an extensive selection of Kant's posthumous Notes and Fragments (2005) in the Cambridge Edition; a survey of Kant, called simply Kant (2006); a Reader's Guide to Kant's Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (2007); and three collections of my essays, Kant's System of Nature and Freedom (2005), Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics (2005), and Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume (2008). In August, 2011, I completed a three-volume history of modern aesthetics from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, entitled The Evolution of Modern Aesthetics: Truth, Feeling, and Play; it will appear soon. My next project will be a book on the impact of Kant's moral philosophy on the subsequent history of philosophy, as part of a series on The Legacy of Kant that I am editing for Oxford University Press, which will also include volumes by Michael Friedman, Sebastian Gardner, Howard Williams, and Paul Frank.

At the mid- and graduate level, I teach all areas of Kant on a regular rotation, I teach a rotation of courses on eighteenth-, nineteenth-. and twentieth-century aesthetics.  I also teach eighteenth-century British moral philosophy.  At the introductory level I teach aesthetics and the history of modern philosophy.  I am occasionally able to offer seminars on the reception of various areas of Kant's philosophy.

I am currently working on a project on the relation between the life sciences and metaphysics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Specifically, I am tracing the evolution of the concepts of mechanism, teleology, individuation, and laws in the metaphysics of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Albrecht von Haller, and Caspar Friedrich Wolff as each tries to explain the generation of new organisms. I am also working on a number of papers on early modern women philosophers, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, and Émilie Du Châtelet. These will culminate in three larger projects: one on Cavendish's natural philosophy, its relation to her implicit political philosophy, and the conceptual relation between her philosophy and that of Hobbes and Spinoza; a second on Du Châtelet's natural philosophy, its conceptual relation to the work of Leibniz and Newton, and her historical role in the emergence of modern science near the end of the eighteenth century; and a third using the works of early modern women philosophers as a prism through which to examine questions in the historiography of philosophy. I have teaching interests in the Philosophy of Education, and will eventually conduct research on early modern educational theories, including an investigation of theories of women's education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.