Research

I have a paper in the Journal of Modern Philosophy on Spinoza’s accounts of the mind eternality, love, and knowledge. You can find it here. The thesis is that Spinoza’s system lets us to keep a loved one “with us,” so to speak, after their death. This is done by increasing knowledge of the loved one’s eternal “something” (as Spinoza calls it) during their life, and then reflecting on this knowledge once they have passed. I further argue that doing this is a Spinozistic good, wherein our joy is preserved or strengthened.

I have a paper in the Journal of Spinoza Studies on Spinoza’s philosophy of suicide, and how it can encourage better practices in contemporary suicide research. You can find it here. This paper resolves remaining tensions in Spinoza’s views of suicide, suggesting that he thinks that, in some cases, suicides can be rational, before briefly applying Spinoza’s views to questions about contemporary suicide research.

My dissertation is on how Spinoza’s social views inform us about his fundamental metaphysics and epistemology. I have chapters on the nature of social groups understood as extended bodies, on how Spinoza’s view of the mental power of social groups informs us of his views of knowledge generally, on how his social epistemology reveals features of our metaphysical essences, and on how his commitment to the value of human-human social interaction and politics reveals the range of his fundamental epistemology.

I am writing a paper on François Poulain de la Barre’s conceptualist view of universals and how he applies it to questions of differentiation of extended bodies into universal sex categories. A version of this paper won the British Society for the History of Philosophy Graduate Essay Prize and is currently in-preparation.