My research centers on historical topics relating to perception and can be divided into four areas of interest. You can also take a look at my PhilPeople profile.
Ferret, near Mont Blanc
Kant. My recent work accounts for the specific role of the imagination in Kant's philosophy. My dissertation, Kant’s Theory of Images, is a defense and exploration of the underappreciated role of mental images in human perception and cognition for Kant (here is an abstract). On my view, Kant separates out the contribution of sensing (and intuition) from the contribution of imagining (and images) to human perception and cognition. The result is a novel account of what he calls sensibility in which both the imagination and the senses play substantive but distinct roles. In my forthcoming "Imagination and the Distinction Between Image and Intuition in Kant," I challenge the received view that “imagining” and “intuiting” come to the same thing for Kant. (For further context, see discussion referencing my work in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on the Kantian Conceptualism/Non-Conceptualism debate.) Kant maintains that the imagination organizes and reproduces the contents provided in intuition; moreover, this organization is not merely an intellectual content superimposed onto perceptual content, but instead part of the very perceptual content itself (as an image). I received research funding for this project during the 2018/2019 academic year from the DAAD.
Early Modern Philosophy. My work in early modern European philosophy addresses various themes in the philosophy of perception and imagination. Some of this work provides context for Kant's own work. For instance, one of Kant’s predecessors, Johann Nikolaus Tetens, had a profound and well-documented influence on Kant’s account of experience. In the forthcoming co-authored paper "Tetens on the Nature of Experience: Between Rationalism and Empiricism," we argue that Tetens substantially anticipates Kant’s own conception of experience. We are continuing this project to investigate how Tetens' conception of "transcendent" philosophy compares with Kant's conception of "transcendental" philosophy, particularly in Tetens' formulation of what Kant came to call the "metaphysical deduction" and "transcendental deduction." Some of my other work engages more broadly with early modern conceptions of images and the imagination. I am currently working on a presentation that compares Descartes, Leibniz, and Hume on the imagination, with the eventual hope of looking at critiques of those figures by Spinoza (critiquing Descartes) and Mary Shepherd (critiquing Hume).
Philosophical Psychology in the 19th/20th Century. I am interested in the reception of Kant's theory of the mind in 19th and 20th century philosophical psychology. Of particular note, Hermann von Helmholtz, himself a developer of the trichromatic theory of color vision among his numerous achievements in psychology and physics, ultimately adopted a metaphysics of the properties that we perceive with many similarities to Kant. In my published paper Helmholtz on Perceptual Properties (discussed in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Helmholtz), I argue that Helmholtz has a relationalist metaphysics of perceptual properties – one that has similarities both to Kant’s own transcendental idealism (according to some readings) and to certain contemporary accounts of the metaphysics of perceptual properties in the philosophy of mind (and in particular, in the metaphysics of color). I intend to return to the role that mental imagery plays in Helmholtz's theory of spatial representation. I have also translated work by the psychologist Carl Stumpf, who had a significant influence on Edmund Husserl's development of phenomenology, and future projects will investigate the relationship that figures like Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Cassirer, and Mary Whiton Calkins have to Kant and German Idealism more broadly.
Philosophy of Imagination. Sometimes the imagination yields us knowledge: I know that I should add salt to a dish by imagining how it would taste with more salt. But sometimes it does not. We are able to imagine things that are impossible (I can imagine that I am the son of Cleopatra). Some things are possible that are hard or impossible to imagine (like, as Descartes argued, a 1000-sided figure, or as we might note today, 10-dimensional space-time). Sometimes we can imagine someone else's perspective, and sometimes we cannot or fail to do so. In light of recent and classical work on the philosophical psychology of imagination by Amy Kind, Stephen Kosslyn, and Jean-Paul Sartre, among others, I am currently planning a long-term project, The Imagination as a Capacity to Know, to analyze both the positive and the negative epistemic effects of the imagination. Following out a thread I find in Kant, a central thought behind this project is that mental images (as opposed to mere pretending or stipulation) play a key role in the cases of imagining that yield knowledge.