Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy Since 1600
Recent French and German Thought
Science and Technology Studies
Ph.D., University of Chicago, 1981.
Dissertation: "Goethe, Newton, and Color: Background and Rationale of an Unrealized Scientific Controversy." Adviser: Stephen Toulmin
Research and coursework at the Institute for the History of the Natural Sciences (Deutsches Museum) and the Philosophical Seminar of the University of Munich, Sept. 1977 to March 1979
M.A., University of Chicago, 1974
B.A., magna cum laude, Harvard University, 1973
Books:
Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 33. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag, 2013.
Descartes's Imagination: Proportion, Images, and the Activity of Thinking. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
Newtons Optical Writings: A Guided Study. Masterworks of Discovery. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.
Goethe contra Newton: Polemics and the Project for a New Science of Color. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Articles:
“Cognitive Pluralism as Obligation? In Kant and Philosophy in a Cosmopolitan Sense,” 5 vols., edited by Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, et al. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Kant Congress 2010. Berlin, Boston: Walter De Gruyter, 2013.
“Cartesian Imaginations: The Method and Passions of Imagining." In A Companion to Rationalism, edited by Alan Nelson, 156-176. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
“Spinoza, Leibniz, and the Rationalist Reconceptions of Imagination.” In A Companion to Rationalism, edited by Alan Nelson, 322342. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005.
“Goethe and the Poetics of Science.” Janus Head 8, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 207-227.
“Phenomenology” and “Mind-Body Problems,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, edited by John L. Heilbron. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
“Prospero and the Times of Reading,” in Uniting the Liberal Arts: Core and Context: Selected Essays for the Fifth Annual Conference of the Association of Core Texts and Courses, edited by Bainard Cowan and Scott Lee. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2002, 83-87.
“The Texture of Thought: Why Descartes' Meditationes is Meditational, and Why It Matters,” in Descartes' Natural Philosophy, edited by Stephen Gaukroger, John Schuster, and John Sutton. London: Routledge, 2000, 736-750.