Current Research Interests

I am currently working on a book (Berkeley's Mind) on how George Berkeley's overall philosophy is guided by his theory of mind. That theory, I am discovering, draws on strategies characteristic of the Renaissance logician Peter Ramus. The immediate source for Berkeley's way of thinking would have been the Puritan thinkers who were influential at Trinity College Dublin throughout the seventeenth century. But because their ideas have been misunderstood (often by Berkeley's contemporaries like Locke), it is not surprising that Berkeley does not acknowledge them. My aim is to show how Berkeley's epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and even political theory are united by his reliance on a way of thinking that goes back to early Stoic logic.

This is the second of a series of three books dealing with this topic. The first was The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics (Indiana University Press, 1994). The third will be devoted to Leibniz. All three assume that there is much more to the image of the book of nature in modern philosophy than simply an intriguing metaphor. A decade ago, when I was enamored with contemporary continental philosphy, I called this overall enterprise poststructuralist historiography, because it required us to suspend certain prejudices (such as the distinction between word, idea, and thing) that characterize the historiography of 17^th-18^th century philosophy. Now I see that thinkers such as those mentioned above invite us to challenge preconceptions about modern philosophy while still employing the vocabulary of their contemporaries.