Research

There are three main distinct but overlapping and intimately related branches to my research program: (i) history of early modern philosophy (with a focus on personhood), (ii) contemporary social epistemology (with a focus on epistemic injustice theory), and (iii) feminist history of philosophy (with a focus on metaphilosophy and canon expansion).

(i) History of Early Modern Philosophy
My research in the history of early modern philosophy has been largely driven by several questions—most of them metaphysical or ontological in nature:

• Are entities that have the ability to think substantially different from those that do not? In other words, can matter think?

• What makes an entity a person, and thus the proper object of moral praise and blame? Is it having certain capacities? Are those capacities tied to having a soul? What is the nature of the soul?

• What makes any person the same person over time? Having the same soul? Having the same body? Remaining the same human being? Or, something different?

• How much difference is there between human beings and the rest of the created world, if any?

• How do different philosophers think of moral praise and blame in general, and Divine punishment and reward, in particular?

Most of my attention has been on the ways in which John Locke (1632-1704) works to flesh out, and address, these questions. I have also extensively explored how less frequently discussed early modern philosophers, such as Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679-1749), Anne Finch Conway (1631-1679), and Anthony Collins (1676–1729) contribute to these debates.

More recently, my interest has shifted to different kinds of questions about persons—questions that are more political or ethical in nature:

• What does it mean to grant another the status of personhood?

• How can this status be eroded, denied, or stripped of an individual?

• How do such questions intersect with gender and race?

• How can the framework of epistemic injustice help us better interrogate these questions?

I will tackle these questions in a future book project, Locke on the Metaphysics and Politics of Persons—though I take up related issues in “Locke on Midwifery and Childbirth: A Sexist Epistemology?” (The Lockean Mind, co-edited with Shelley Weinberg (Routledge, 2022)). Such questions are also at the center of a book that I’m currently writing titled Unheeded: Theories of Epistemic Injustice, Then and Now (co-authored with Nancy Kendrick).

(ii) Contemporary Social Epistemology
The aim of this portion of my research program, and Unheeded in particular, is to trace a lineage between current discussions of epistemic injustice and philosophical discussions of long ago to show that philosophers have been identifying and theorizing such harms all along—or at least since the seventeenth century. I argue that, contrary to popular belief, epistemic injustice theory is not an invention of the 21st century. Moreover, in turning to the early modern period we can gain access to views and perspectives that can impact both theory and practice today.

 
7 chapters of Unheeded are complete. We plan to have a full draft of the manuscript by early 2024.

(iii) Feminist History of Philosophy

In addition to writing journal articles on understudied philosophers’ texts—and especially those authored by women—I also use scholarship to explicitly advocate for teaching a more inclusive and diverse range of thinkers in history of early modern philosophy courses (2015).

However, one of the challenges that instructors face when engaged in teaching an expanded canon is having access to original texts and materials. To help remedy this, I am co-editing Catharine Trotter Cockburn: Selected Writings (under contract with Kylie Shahar (UMN PhD candidate)). Our Hackett book includes not just Cockburn’s better-known defenses of canonical male philosophers (Locke and Clarke), but also one of her plays, a piece on education, and that which we would likely call “public philosophy” today. Selected Writings will be just the second modern edition of Cockburn’s works and the first based on her original papers. Central to our editorial aims is problematizing the way we tend to think about what counts as philosophy and the way in which gender plays a role therein.

One of the take-home messages of this area of my research and the metaphilosophical articles I’ve authored with Kendrick wherein we show how we as scholars can engage in practices that inadvertently serve to undermine the philosophical authority of the early modern women philosophers we are working so hard to recover is that we must be mindful of the narratives we are creating as we work to include women in the history we tell of our discipline.