Starting in Fall 2023 I will be a professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University at Buffalo.
My recent book, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, looks at a significant part of the philosophical debate about materialism in seventeenth-century Europe. The book begins with Thomas Hobbes, who engaged critically with Descartes, and developed his own materialist account of the human mind, and even of God. It then turns to the work of three of Hobbes’s critics: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. The second half of the book looks at the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. Locke…
Starting in Fall 2023 I will be a professor in the Department of Philosophy of the University at Buffalo.
My recent book, Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, looks at a significant part of the philosophical debate about materialism in seventeenth-century Europe. The book begins with Thomas Hobbes, who engaged critically with Descartes, and developed his own materialist account of the human mind, and even of God. It then turns to the work of three of Hobbes’s critics: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. The second half of the book looks at the discussion of materialism in John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding. Locke was aware of the earlier debate between Hobbes and his critics, and we can see him drawing on and responding to their work as he discusses the same issues himself. Locke rejected Hobbes’s approach, and was not himself a materialist, though he acknowledged that materialism might be true. Nevertheless, he also did a lot to show how one might be a materialist, by developing an account of the mind that made no reference to an immaterial soul.
