My research focuses on the history of modern philosophy.

To date, I’ve concentrated mainly on David Hume’s philosophy. I’ve also been exploring its relations to contemporary issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind. A forthcoming paper, ‘The Priority of Passive Reasoning’, puts Hume into dialogue with Paul Boghossian, John Broome and others on the nature of reasoning.

My works in progress also include (i) a monograph on Hume’s “anatomy” of the mind; (ii) a new student edition of Hume’s first Enquiry, under contract with W. W. Norton; and (iii) a multi-author collection entitled Naturalism in Early Modern Philosophy: Spinoza, Hume, and Shepherd, which I’m co-editing with Aaron Garrett, and for which I’m writing a new paper on Mary Shepherd’s philosophy of mind.

Lately, I’ve become interested in Shepherd and several other figures in nineteenth-century British philosophy: Thomas Brown, T. H. Huxley, and Charles Darwin. I plan to explore their ideas in future work.

Under Contract

Norton Library edition of David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. W. W. Norton.

Journal Articles

Natural Teleology in Hume’s ‘Sceptical Solution’. Journal of Modern Philosophy, forthcoming.

Representation and Copying in Hume’s Treatise and Later Works. Ergo (2021) 8(4): 83–109.

Perceptions, Minds, and Hume’s Self-Doubts. (Part of a Book Symposium on Donald C. Ainslie, Hume’s True Scepticism.) Hume Studies (2019) 45(1&2): 109–113.

Unperceived Existence and Hume’s Theory of Ideas. Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, Vol. 9 (2019): 167–213.

Hume’s Answer to Bayle on the Vacuum. Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (2019) 101(2): 205–36.

Hume on Mental Representation and Intentionality. Philosophy Compass (2018).

A Puzzle about Fictions in the Treatise. Journal of the History of Philosophy (2016) 54(1): 47–73.

Minds, Composition, and Hume’s Skepticism in the Appendix. The Philosophical Review (2015) 124(4): 533–569.

Book Chapters

The Priority of Passive Reasoning. In Scott Stapleford and Verena Wagner (eds.), Hume and Contemporary Epistemology (Routledge, forthcoming).

Hume on Space and Time: A Limited Defense. In The Humean Mind, ed. Angela Coventry and Alexander Sager, 83–95 (Routledge, 2019).

Encyclopedia Articles

Imagination, in Modern Philosophy. Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy Online (2017).

David Hume: Imagination. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2015) (peer-reviewed).

Book Reviews

Margaret Watkins, ‘The Philosophical Progress of Hume’s Essays’. Mind (2021) 130(520): 1336–1348.

Timothy M. Costelloe, ‘The Imagination in Hume’s Philosophy: The Canvas of the Mind’. Journal of the History of Philosophy (2019) 57(3): 559–560.

Paul Russell (ed.), ‘The Oxford Handbook of Hume’. British Journal for the History of Philosophy (2018) 26(3): 622–625.

Graciela De Pierris, ‘Ideas, Evidence, and Method: Hume’s Skepticism and Naturalism concerning Knowledge and Causation’. The Philosophical Review (2017) 126(3): 393–398.