I am interested in the way that early (broadly) empiricist or idealist philosophers (esp. Berkeley, Hume, Du Chatelet, and Edwards) responded to the challenge of the emergence of Newtonian Mechanics. My research examines how such philosophers understand and critique the use metaphysics in the method and theories of experimental philosophers, especially Newton and Galileo.

I am braodly interested in faculty psychology and theories of mind in the early modern period, including the epistemological implications of the kind of faculty psychology one finds in the empiricists. One particular theme I'm interested in is the role of the imagination in theories of mind in the early modern period. For many figures at the beginning of the period, the imagination is just fledgling faculty for retrieving and manipulating sensory contents. By the end of the early modern period, it has become the foremost faculty of the mind (and perhaps even identical to the mind) in Hume and Kant.