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Academic History

I came to UCSD in July 2001 after having spent five years as an assistant professor of philosophy at Florida State University.  I was promoted to associate professor in July 2003, and to full professor in March 2009.

Although my graduate training was primarily in the philosophy of language, my work focuses mostly on topics in ancient philosophy (particularly Plato), early modern philosophy (particularly Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley), ethics, and constitutional law.  Recently I have been working on a reconstruction and evaluation of Berkeley’s argument for idealism (in the form of a monograph), a paper on will and motivation in seventeenth century British philosophy (focusing on the work of Bramhall, Hobbes, Cudworth, and Locke), a paper on qualities in the seventeenth century, a paper on Plato’s use of the definitional method of collection and division in the Sophist, and a paper on the moral status of enabling harm.

News: My book, Plato’s Forms in Transition: A Reading of the Parmenides (Cambridge University Press), was published in December 2006.  See here or here.

John Palmer published a critical review of my book in the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  You can find my response to Palmer’s review here.

I am the editor for the History:Modern section of Blackwell Philosophy Compass.