Martha Brandt Bolton Professor I Contact Information Office: Davison Hall 134 Email: Phone: (732) 932-9861 x134

Education

B.A., Ohio Wesleyan University; Ph.D., University of Michigan

Speciality

Early modern Phil.

Research

All aspects of early modern philosophy with special attention to theory of knowledge, method, and metaphysical topics. Special interest in women philosophers of the early modern period. Work ranges over many figures, including Hobbes, Gassendi, Arnauld, Cudworth, Trotter, Masham, as well as more familiar philosophers. Main current research project on the dialogue between Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Leibniz's Nouveaux Essais concerning both methodological and substantive topics. Current projects also include how to understand Descartes' principal attribute thought, Lady Mary Shepherd's theory of causality and physical and matehmatical induction, Berkeley's vies of the intentional objects of immediate perceptual knowledge.

Selected Publications

"Locke on Sensory Representation" in Perception and Reality: from Descartes to the Present, ed. Ralph Schumacher (Paderborn: Mentis, 2003), pp. 146-67. "Locke on the Semantic and Epistemic Role of Simple Ideas of Sensation", Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (2004), pp. 301-21. "Leibniz to Arnauld: Aristotelian and Platonic Themes on Matter and Corporeal Substance" in Leibniz and His Correspondents, ed. Paul Lodge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 97-122. "Leibniz and the Limits of Perception", Einheit in der Vielheit: Proceedings of VIII. International Leibniz-Kongress, ed. Hans Posner (Berlin: 2006). "The Taxonomy of Ideas in Locke's Essay" in Cambridge Companion to Locke's Essay, ed. Lex Newman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 67-100. "Leibniz's Nouveaux Essais: a Contest by Dialogue", in Leibniz and the English Speaking World, ed. Pauline Phemister and Stuart Brown (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2007), pp. 11-132. "Berkeley and Mental Representation: Why Not a Lockean Theory of Ideas?" in New Interpretations of Berkeley's Philosophy, ed. Stephen H. Daniel (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, in press), pp. 79-108. "Locke on Rational Virtue and Moral Law" in Early Modern Metaphysics: Essays in Honor of Vere Chappell, ed. David Owen, Gideon Yaffe, and Paul Hoffman (Peterborough, CA: Broadview Press, expected 2007).