Dissertation: On what Nature taught Descartes
My dissertation takes on the task of squaring the methods and content of Descartes’s final treatise, the Passions of the Soul, with his philosophical system. I find that the Passions can be consistently read back into Descartes’s earlier works, allowing for a critique of deductive-rationalist readings of his epistemic project, a reading of Descartes’s approach to the problem of mind-body interaction, a comment on the role of resolution in his ethics, and making room for the second person perspective in his philosophy. My interventions are organized by a close reading of Descartes’s correspondence with Elizabeth of Bohemia, which provides a clear narrative that relates these issues to one another.
Presentations
- “Human institutions and natural institutions in Descartes’s philosophy”
- Conference: Analogies in Modern Philosophy and Science, October 2025
- “Elizabeth’s anxiety and Descartes’s method for tranquility”
- Quebec Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy, August 2025
- “Applying Descartes’s causal principle to the passions of the soul”
- UCSD Modern Philosophy Graduate Workshop, May 2022
- Traveling Early Modern Philosophy Organization Conference, May 2022
Pregnancy and Birth
The philosophy of pregnancy is a burgeoning subdiscipline in which I see two main families of questions. The first is metaphysical: what kind of entities are involved in pregnancy? How many are there? How do the constituents of a pregnancy relate to one another? The second family of questions concerns intersubjectivity: what do our beginnings in pregnancy say about the human condition? What is the significance of our early physical interdependence in pregnancy? I am interested in both historical and contemporary treatments of these questions.
(Under contract) Pregnancy, History, and Philosophy, Palgrave Macmillan
Along with co-editors Myrna Gabbe and Maja Sidzińska, I am editing a volume currently under contract with Palgrave Macmillan, provisionally titled Pregnancy, History, and Philosophy. My chapter in the volume, “Maternal Resemblance and Maternal Effects in Porphyry’s To Gaurus,” discusses how Porphyry used an analogy to graft hybrids in horticulture to explain how infants come to resemble their mothers, despite being formed from an exclusively paternal ‘seed’.
(Under review) A paper on animalism and pregnancy
Animalism claims that each of us is identical with a human animal, and looks to biology to provide the existence and persistence conditions of animals. But biologists individuate living things using multiple distinct definitions of ‘organism’ that conflict in the case of human pregnancy. Under some definitions, the fetus and pregnant animal are separate organisms, but they are one unified organism under other definitions. The animalist who wishes to rely on biology cannot ignore relevant areas of biology by choosing just one definition of organism, but neither can they accept a plural notion of organism while preserving the structure of their central claim that we are human animals. The case of pregnancy shows that animalism cannot pass the buck for defining the existence conditions of animals to biologists.
Presentations
- “Persons as organisms and the pregnancy problem: an upshot for abortion debates”
- APA Pacific Division Meeting, April 2023
- “What should animalism say about pregnant human animals?”
- APA Central Division Meeting, February 2023
- Ohio Philosophical Association Conference, April 2022
- Syracuse University Graduate Philosophy Conference, March 2022
- “Leibniz on the order and artifice in reproduction”
- Leibniz Society of North America Conference, November 2020
- Traveling Early Modern Philosophy Organization Conference, June 2020
Evangelian Collings 