Sebastian Bender

My research focuses on early modern philosophy. It is primarily concerned with the metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind of this era. More recently, I have started to be interested in early modern social and political philosophy as well. My work deals with figures such as Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Arnold Geulincx, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Anne Conway, John Locke, Margaret Cavendish, George Berkeley, David Hume, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Immanuel Kant. I have written a book on Leibniz's metaphysics of modality (the book, entitled Leibniz' Metaphysik der Modalität, is based on my dissertation and came out in 2016 with De Gruyter). Right now, I am working, among other things, on papers dealing with Conway's metaphysics, Malebranche's account of causation, Spinoza's account of essence and persistence, and Kant's 'possibility proof' for the existence of God. I am also working on a book manuscript about early modern theories of causation (the working title is Causation and Containment. An Essay in Early Modern Metaphysics).