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1Anne Conway on the identity of creatures over timeIn Early Modern Women on Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
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Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Cockburn on MatterIn Karen Detlefsen & Lisa Shapiro (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy, Routledge. 2023.
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Creation, Divine Freedom, and Catharine Cockburn: An Intellectualist on Possible Worlds and Contingent LawsIn Jacqueline Broad & Karen Detlefsen (eds.), Women and Liberty, 1600-1800: Philosophical Essays, Oxford University Press. 2017.
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62Catharine Cockburn on Unthinking Immaterial Substance: Souls, Space, and Related MattersPhilosophy Compass 10 (4): 255-263. 2015.The early modern Catharine Cockburn wrote on a wide range of philosophical issues and recent years have seen an increasing interest in her work. This paper explores her thesis that immaterial substance need not think. Drawing on existing scholarship, I explore the origin of this thesis in Cockburn and show how she applies it in a novel way to space. This thesis provides a particularly useful entry point into Cockburn's philosophy, as it emphasises the importance of her metaphysics and connects w…Read more
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10Tattoo YouIn Fritz Allhoff & Robert Arp (eds.), Tattoos – Philosophy for Everyone, Wiley‐blackwell. 2012-04-06.This chapter contains sections titled: Questions of Identity1 Personal Identity Across Time Somatic and Psychological Accounts Tattoos and the Somatic Account Narrative Identity Tattoos of Anchors … and Anything Else as Anchors When You Get a Tattoo, You Tattoo You.
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17Self, Reason, and Freedom: A New Light on Descartes' Metaphysics, by Andrea ChristofidouMind 124 (494): 616-619. 2015.
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47The Idealism and Pantheism of May SinclairJournal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (2): 137-157. 2019.During the early twentieth century, British novelist and philosopher May Sinclair published two book-length defenses of idealism. Although Sinclair is well known to literary scholars, she is little known to the history of philosophy. This paper provides the first substantial scholarship on Sinclair's philosophical views, focusing on her mature idealism. Although Sinclair is working within the larger British idealist tradition, her argument for Absolute idealism is unique, founded on Samuel Alexa…Read more
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14The Philosophy of Joseph Priestley's 1765 TimelineHistory of Philosophy Quarterly 40 (1): 25-58. 2023.In 1765, Joseph Priestley created what may be the world's first modern timeline, A Chart of Biography. This paper offers the first study of the philosophy underlying Priestley's timeline. It argues that Priestley was pushed towards representing times as lines by his views on abstract ideas and time, and there is no reason to believe that Newtonian absolutism grounds his uniform depiction of time. Further, the Chart confirms, and even advances, Priestley's views on human progress. Finally, this s…Read more
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35The obsession with time in 1880s–1930s American-British philosophyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (2): 149-160. 2023.ABSTRACT In American-British philosophy around the turn of the twentieth century, every philosopher and their dog had something to say on time. Thinkers worried about our experience of time, and the metaphysics of time. This introduction to the special issue, Time in American-British Philosophy 1880s-1930s, investigates that obsession, explaining how its philosophers spilled pints of ink on time, and produced the first-ever surveys of time. I historically contextualise their work and explore som…Read more
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Samuel Alexander's space-time God : a naturalist rival to current emergentist theologiesIn Andrei A. Buckareff & Yujin Nagasawa (eds.), Alternative Concepts of God: Essays on the Metaphysics of the Divine, Oxford University Press. 2016.
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27Mary Calkins, Victoria Welby, and the spatialization of timeBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (2): 205-230. 2022.This paper explores a trans-Atlantic clash about time: in 1899, American philosopher Mary Calkins argued we should not spatialize time; in 1899, British philosopher Victoria Welby argued we should. I take their disagreement as a starting point to contextualize, study, and compare the accounts of time presented in their respective articles. Both Calkins and Welby cared deeply about time, writing on the topic across their careers, but their views have not been studied by historians of philosophy. …Read more
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57Anne Conway as a Priority Monist: A Reply to Gordon-RothJournal of the American Philosophical Association 6 (3): 275-284. 2020.For early modern metaphysician Anne Conway, the world comprises creatures. In some sense, Conway is a monist about creatures: all creatures are one. Yet, as Jessica Gordon-Roth has astutely pointed out, that monism can be understood in very different ways. One might read Conway as an ‘existence pluralist’: creatures are all composed of the same type of substance, but many substances exist. Alternatively, one might read Conway as an ‘existence monist’: there is only one created substance. Gordon-…Read more
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13The Meaning of Travel: Philosophers AbroadOxford University Press. 2020.The first ever history of the places where history and philosophy meet, from the Age of Discovery in the sixteenth century to contemplation of how space travel will affect our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first. This book will reshape your understanding of travel.
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19Absolute Time: Rifts in Early Modern British MetaphysicsOxford University Press. 2018.What is time? This is one of the most fundamental questions we can ask. Emily Thomas explores how a new theory of time emerged in the seventeenth century. The 'absolute' theory of time held that it is independent of material bodies or human minds, so even if nothing else existed there would be time.
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38Early Modern Women on Metaphysics (edited book)Cambridge University Press. 2018.The work of women philosophers in the early modern period has traditionally been overlooked, yet their writing on topics such as reality, time, mind and matter holds valuable lessons for our understanding of metaphysics and its history. This volume of new essays explores the work of nine key female figures: Bathsua Makin, Anna Maria van Schurman, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Émilie Du Châtelet. Invest…Read more
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3Alexander, SamuelIn James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge. 2011.
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32Henry More and the Development of Absolute TimeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 54 11-19. 2015.This paper explores the nature, development and influence of the first English account of absolute time, put forward in the mid-seventeenth century by the ‘Cambridge Platonist’ Henry More. Against claims in the literature that More does not have an account of time, this paper sets out More's evolving account and shows that it reveals the lasting influence of Plotinus. Further, this paper argues that More developed his views on time in response to his adoption of Descartes' vortex cosmology and c…Read more
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100Time, space, and process in Anne ConwayBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 25 (5): 990-1010. 2017.Many scholars have drawn attention to the way that elements of Anne Conway’s system anticipate ideas found in Leibniz. This paper explores the relationship between Conway and Leibniz’s work with regard to time, space, and process. It argues – against existing scholarship – that Conway is not a proto-Leibnizian relationist about time or space, and in fact her views lie much closer to those of Henry More; yet Conway and Leibniz agree on the primacy of process. This exploration advances our underst…Read more
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61The spatial location of God and Casper the friendly ghostThink 8 (21): 53-61. 2009.Emily Thomas questions the common claim that spiritual objects cannot be spatially located
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15Descartes-agonistes: Physico-mathematics, method and corpuscular-mechanism 1618-33Annals of Science 73 (1): 112-114. 2016.
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53Hilda Oakeley on Idealism, History and the Real PastBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (5): 933-953. 2015.In the early twentieth century, Hilda Diana Oakeley set out a new kind of British idealism. Oakeley is an idealist in the sense that she holds mind to actively contribute to the features of experience, but she also accepts that there is a world independent of mind. One of her central contributions to the idealist tradition is her thesis that minds construct our experiences using memory. This paper explores the theses underlying her idealism, and shows how they are intricately connected to the wi…Read more
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123Space, Time, and Samuel AlexanderBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (3): 549-569. 2013.Super-substantivalism is the thesis that space is identical to matter; it is currently under discussion ? see Sklar (1977, 221?4), Earman (1989, 115?6) and Schaffer (2009) ? in contemporary philosophy of physics and metaphysics. Given this current interest, it is worth investigating the thesis in the history of philosophy. This paper examines the super-substantivalism of Samuel Alexander, an early twentieth century metaphysician primarily associated with (the movement now known as) British Emerg…Read more
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51In Defense of Real Cartesian Motion: A Reply to LennonJournal of the History of Philosophy 53 (4): 747-762. 2015.thomas lennon has argued for an innovative “Eleatic” reading of Descartes. At its heart is the thesis that Descartes is a phenomenalist about motions; with this in place, Lennon goes on to argue that Descartes is also a phenomenalist about individual material bodies. Conjuring up the ghosts of Eleatics such as Parmenides, Lennon describes a Cartesian material world in which moving, individual bodies are appearances, not realities. This paper takes issue with Lennon’s thesis that Cartesian motion…Read more
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57Baking with Kant and BradleyCollingwood and British Idealism Studies 19 (1): 75-94. 2013.This paper compares the views of Kant and F.H. Bradley on the nature of judgment or experience. We argue that, while there are many differences between their idealist systems, Kant and Bradley agree on a basic issue: there is a sense in which a whole judgment or experience is prior to its parts. Through the extended metaphor of cake baking, we show that for Kant there is an important sense in which a judgment --in spite of resulting from the synthesis of a manifold --is prior to its parts; and, …Read more
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64British Idealist Monadologies and the Reality of Time: Hilda Oakeley Against McTaggart, Leibniz, and OthersBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (6): 1150-1168. 2015.In the early twentieth century, a rare strain of British idealism emerged which took Leibniz's Monadology as its starting point. This paper discusses a variant of that strain, offered by Hilda Oakeley. I set Oakeley's monadology in its philosophical context and discuss a key point of conflict between Oakeley and her fellow monadologists: the unreality of time. Oakeley argues that time is fundamentally real, a thesis arguably denied by Leibniz and subsequent monadologists, and by all other Britis…Read more
Christ's College, Cambridge
Faculty Of Philosophy
Alumnus
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
19th Century Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Religion |
Aesthetics |
General Philosophy of Science |