I am Professor and James B. and Grace J. Nelson Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I am also currently Department Chair.

I received my Ph. D. from the University of Notre Dame in 1988. Before arriving at Michigan in 2010, I was a member of the Department of Philosophy at Duke University for 21 years.

My areas of specialization are the history of early modern (17th- and 18th-century) philosophy; the history and philosophy of early modern science; and the relation of philosophy and science to theology and politics in the early modern period. I have as particular research interests the following features of early modern thought: the variety of early modern “Cartesianisms”; the influence of late scholasticism; the nature of the “Scientific Revolution”; substance-mode metaphysics and mereology; and theories of causation and freedom.

For my contact information, see the right-hand portion of this and other pages of the website.