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"Many other things I long to be at, but I do extremely want time." --Robert Hooke, 3 Sept 1667
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- March, 2012: finished revised draft of a paper, "Leibniz's Syncategorematic Infinitesimals, SIA and Second Order Differentials". Working on drafts of chapters of my Leibniz for Polity Press.
- February, 2012: abstracts of talks submitted for conferences in Waterloo and Hamilton (May 2012), London and Montreal (October 2012), all accepted.
- January 31, 2012: finished and submitted draft of an entry for the Oxford Handbook on Leibniz, "The Labyrinth of the Continuum".
- December 31, 2011: paper "Virtual Processes and Quantum Tunnelling as Fictions", accepted for publication in Science and Education .
- December 2011: corrected proofs for my paper "Leibniz's Theory of Space", to appear in Foundations of Science.
- December 2011: "Beeckman's discrete moments and Descartes' disdain", published in Intellectual History Review, 22, 1, 69-90.
- October 2011: paper "Presupposition, Aggregation and Leibniz's Argument for a Plurality of Substances", accepted with revisions, for The Leibniz Review.
- September 2011: submitted revised version of "Leibniz's Actual Infinite in Relation to his Analysis of Matter", for Leibniz on the interrelations between mathematics and philosophy, Archimedes Series, Springer Verlag, edited by Norma B. Goethe, Philip Beeley and David Rabouin.
- July 2011: submitted "Presupposition, Aggregation and Leibniz's Argument for a Plurality of Substances", to The Leibniz Review.
- July 2011: submitted final version of "Beeckman's discrete moments and Descartes' disdain", for a special issue of Intellectual History Review edited by Stephen Gaukroger, Geoffrey Gorham and Ed Slowik.
- July 2011: submitted "Virtual Processes and Quantum Tunnelling as Fictions", for a special issue of Science & Education devoted to the appraisal of Mario Bunge's contribution to philosophy, ed. David Blitz.
- June 2011: submitted final version of "Can Thought Experiments be Resolved by Experiment? the Case of Aristotle's Wheel", for Philosophical Thought Experiments, (Routledge) edited by Letitia Meynell, James R. Brown and Melanie Frappier.
- June 2011: presented a paper, "Presupposition, Aggregation and Leibniz's Argument for a Plurality of Substances", at the Fifth Annual Conference of the North American Leibniz Society in San Diego.
- May 2011: publication of Natural Deduction: An introduction to logic with real arguments, some history and a little humour, by Broadview Press.
- March 2011: submitted draft of "Leibniz's Actual Infinite in Relation to his Analysis of Matter", for a volume edited by Norma Goethe and Philip Beeley.
- March 2011: proofread (three times!) Natural Deduction, my introduction to logic, forthcoming with Broadview .
- February 2011: submitted draft of "Atoms", an entry for the Descartes Lexicon, ed. Larry Nolan.
- December 2010: wrote first draft of chapter 1 of The Now in Physics, and started work on chapter 6.
- November 2010: broke my right wrist in 3 places playing street hockey and had steel plate inserted.
- October 2010: received book contract from Polity Press for Leibniz (an introductory treatment in their Classic Thinkers Series).
- October 2010: submitted review of Niccolo Guicciardini, Isaac Newton on Mathematical Certainty and Method (MIT Press, 2009), for BJHS.
- September 13-16, 2010: co-organized a workshop with Niccolo Guicciardini, "On the Contested Expanding Role of Applied Mathematics from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment", and presented a paper, "On the mathematization of motion before instantaneous velocity: Galileo and Descartes ", at the Centro De Giorgi in Pisa, Italy.
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upcoming conferences and talks
Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Toronto, April 4, 2012: "Leibniz on the Relativity of Motion".
Philosophy of Science Conference, International Centre, Dubrovnik, April 16-20, 2012: "Quantum Tunnelling and Virtual Processes as Fictions."
Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science/SHCPS, Waterloo, May 27-29, 2012: "Leibniz on the Relativity of Motion".
First Annual Conference of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy, McMaster University, Hamilton, May 24-26, 2012: "Vexed Relations: the many ironies of Russell's critique of Leibniz's relationalism."
Rotman Institute, University of Western Ontario, October 11-14, 2012, "The Premodern Theory of Motion: Galileo and Descartes."
2012 Leibniz Society of North America, Université de Montréal and Concordia University, October 19-20, 2012, "Leibniz on the Relativity of Motion".
p h i l o s o p h y .o f .s c i e n c e
- Phil 3D03. Winter Term 2009. 3rd year course on issues ranging from the reality of quarks to who's right in the so-called "Science Wars"
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- Phil 4A03/6A03. Winter Term 2006. The natural philosophy of Descartes and Leibniz..
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- Phil 1E03. Fall Term 2003. The introduction to philosophy course
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- h i s t o r i c a l .c o n t e x t .o f. m o d e r n . s c i e n c e
- AS 3CF3. Fall Term 2009. Previous version of 3rd year Arts and Science Discovery: Context of Scientific Research course.
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research interests
seventeenth century philosophy: My main area of research over the past 25 years has been seventeenth century philosophy, particularly that of Leibniz. I have a book contract with Polity Press in England for a Leibniz for their Classic Thinkers series. I am also currently completing a (possibly 2-volume) work on Leibniz's natural philosophy and metaphysics based on his solution to the continuum problem: Ariadnean Threads . In it I offer new interpretations of Leibniz's theory of substance, his theory of the infinite and infinitesimals, and his theories of space, time, motion and continuity.
I have also been investigating the lively atomist tradition of the early seventeenth century and its connection with biology, theology, and the chymical tradition, particularly in the work of Daniel Sennert.
philosophy of physics: One of my main current interests is the close relationship between time and inertia, on which I have written two papers , "Time, Inertia and the Relativity Principle" (archived paper) in Minnesota, and "Time and Inertia" in Montreal. I have written a chapter for a book project for Springer with Steve Savitt of UBC and Dennis Dieks of Utrecht on The 'Now' in Physics, but although the book has now fallen through, the project may still result in publications. The Time and Universe (tau) Cluster, a collaborative venture with other physicists and philosophers in Canada and around the world, is on hold pending a successful bid for funding. I have recently written on virtual processes, showing the close relationship between them and the phenomenon of quantum tunnelling; I argue that neither can be interpreted in terms of particle transmission, since that would involve processes with imaginary mass travelling backwards in time.
history and philosophy of time: I am also doing substantial work on early modern philosophy of time. I gave a paper on Descartes's debt to Beeckman in his philosophy of time at a symposium in Chicago in mid-February 2010. This is part of a projected third book project treating the interconnection of views on time, force and activity in seventeenth century natural philosophy, Matters of Moment.
philosophy of the infinite: Fourth, arising out of my work on Leibniz, I have been defending an account of the actual infinite that is a rival to the Cantorian account, but which eschews infinite sets. On this topic I have written a dialogue between Leibniz and Cantor, and five related papers: one on the development of Leibniz's early thinking on infinitesimals (abstract); a second on Leibniz's Law of Continuity (abstract); a third in which I compare Leibniz's syncategorematic interpretation of infinitesimals with that of Smooth Infinitesimal Analysis (abstract), a fourth comparing Newton and Leibniz on infinitesimals (abstract, articles online), and a fifth about to be published in the Netherlands, in which (inter alia) I offer a largely sympathetic critique of Deleuze's interpretation of Leibniz's calculus with respect to the rise of structuralism. articles online
epistemology of science, thought experiments: Fifth, I am part of a cluster of scholars interested in thought experiments. I published an article on Galileo's thought experiment on falling bodies and Jim Brown's Platonist interpretation of it, incorporating a weird dream, a partial defence of Feyerabend's views, and my interest in Diderot's materialist philosophy. I also recently read a paper in a workshop in Halifax on one of the world's oldest TEs, Aristotle's Wheel, perhaps originating with Archytas of Tarentum. I also co-hosted a workshop on the (contested) expanding role of applied mathematics from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, in Pisa in September 2010.
courses
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on the writing of philosophy
papers.
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Phil
2B03.
Fall Term 2011. The introductory logic course.
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- Phil 3E03/CS3Y03. Winter Term 2011. 3rd year course.
This course offers a lively introduction to some of the main philosophical issues concerning language. We will motivate the discussion by looking at attempts in the early modern period to devise a perfect language, the later discovery of the Indo-European nucleus of many of the world's languages, the invention of artificial languages, including modern logic and computer languages, the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, and Chomskian linguistics.
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- Phil 4N03. Winter Term 2011. 4th year course on philosophers of the Enlightenment, concentrating on the thinkers whose revolutionary new ideas ushered in the French and American revolutions and defined the "modernism" against which postmodernism defines itself.
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Phil 752. Winter Term 2011. Graduate Seminar on selected Topics in Modern Philosophy: Leibniz and the Labyrinth.
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- AS 3CF3. Fall Term 2010. 3rd year Arts and Science Discovery: Context of Scientific Research course, in which we explore issues in the philosophy of modern science, centering on the methodological, epistemological and political issues raised by the "Science Wars", with many intriguing case studies.
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- Origins 3A03.
Winter Term 2011. 3rd year course: co-lecturers: Ralph Pudritz, Cliff Burgess.
The aim of this course is to survey some of the most important ideas, theories, and experiments that mark the development of our understanding the origin of the cosmos and the nature of spacetime that defines it. Our lectures follow a historical treatment of some of the most important breakthroughs. We also use an interdisciplinary approach by combining history of science, mathematics, astronomy and astrophysics, and physics (such as particle physics). There will be some technical material involving physics and astronomy problems.
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- Phil
762.
Winter Term 2010. Graduate Seminar in selected Topics in
Metaphysics
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- In this course we examine various deep issues in the metaphysics of time relating to the flow of time: does time flow? what are the arguments for and against? does it flow continuously or in discrete time atoms? what is the status of the present or 'now'? is temporal becoming refuted by Zeno's paradoxes? is there no world-wide 'now' according to modern physics? if so, do we live in a static or 'block universe'? does the possibility of time travel preclude temporal becoming? in what sense can past, present and future be said to exist? These
issues will be examined both in their historical context
and with reference to contemporary science and
philosophy.
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