Overview
I work primarily on early modern moral and political philosophy, especially the work of Benedict Spinoza. I am currently writing a book about individuation and social ontology in the early modern period in which I examine the metaphysical commitments behind early modern theories of the body politic and examine the normative significance of these commitments.
Publications
BOOKS
- Humility: A History (ed.), Oxford, 2025
- The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon, (co-edited with Karolina Hübner), Cambridge, 2025
- Spinoza (with Valtteri Viljanen), Polity, 2020
- Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear, Cambridge, 2018
PAPERS
- “Spinoza’s Motivational Pluralism,” Philosophers’ Imprint, forthcoming
- “Humility as a Philosophical Concept: An Introduction,” in Humility: A History, ed. Justin Steinberg (Oxford, 2025).
- “Is the Cosmological Argument Intuitive?” (with Shaun Nichols), in Religious Studies, 61, Special Issue 1 (2025), 22-44.
- “Desire,” “Freedom (Political),” “Law (Political),” “State,” and “Theologico-Political Treatise,” in The Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon, eds. Karolina Hübner and Justin Steinberg (Cambridge, 2025).
- “Russian Marxism and Materialist Readings of Spinoza,” in The History and Philosophy of Materialism, eds. John Symons and Charles Wolfe (Routledge, 2024), 351 – 363.
- “Spinoza’s Political Philosophy,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (revised 2024),
- “Solomon,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Spinoza, second edition, eds. Wiep van Bunge, Henri Krop, Piet Steenbakkers, and Jeroen van de Ven (Bloombury, 2024).
- “Spinoza and Spinozism in Twenty-First Century Anglo-American Philosophy” (Proceedings from The Global Reception of Spinoza’s Thought Conference, Rotterdam), Journal of Spinoza Studies, 3.1 (2023), 63–75.
- “The Affirmative Mind: Spinoza on Striving under the Attribute of Thought,” Ergo, 10 (2023)
- “Enthusiasm, Superstition, and the Radical Enlightenment from Hobbes to Hume” in Fanaticism and the History of Fanaticism, ed. Paul Katsafanas (Routledge, 2023), 67 – 82.
- “Spinoza’s Dynamic Theory of Mind in the 21st Century,” Journal of Spinoza Studies (inaugural volume, invited submission), 1.1 (2022), 111 – 120.
- “Striving, Happiness, and the Good: Spinoza as Follower and Critic of Hobbes,” in A Blackwell Companion to Hobbes, ed. Marcus Adams (Wiley-Blackwell Press, 2021), 431 – 447.
- “ ‘Stop Being So Judgmental!’: A Spinozist Model of Personal Tolerance,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Toleration, ed. Mitja Sardoc (Palgrave Press, 2021), 1 – 17.
- “Spinoza on Security and the Value of Hope,” part of critical exchange, “Spinoza: Thoughts on Hope in our Political Present,” ed. Moira Gatens, Contemporary Political Theory, 20 (2020), 200 – 231.
- “Politics as a Model of Pedagogy in Spinoza,” Ethics and Education, 15:2 (2020), 158 – 172.
- “Spinoza on Civil Agreement and Bodies Politic,” in Spinoza and Relational Autonomy: Being with Others, eds. Aurelia Armstrong, Keith Green, and Andrea Sangiacomo (Edinburgh, 2019), 132 – 148.
- “Spinoza and Political Absolutism,” in Spinoza’s Political Treatise: A Critical Guide, eds. Hasana Sharp and Yitzhak Melamed (Cambridge, 2018), 175 – 189.
- “Two Puzzles Concerning Spinoza’s Conception of Belief,” European Journal of Philosophy, 26:1 (2018), 261 – 282.