Benjamin Hill
Associate Professor
History of Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology
BA Simpson College; MA,
Office: Stevenson Hall 3140
E-mail: bhill28@uwo.ca
Website:
I am most interested in the evolution from late scholastic and Renaissance concepts to early modern ones, roughly 1516 through 1713. I use "evolution" consciously here to emphasize the gradual and mostly continuous nature of this development. Contextualist methods and features are important for my work but equally important are detailed philosophical analyses and assessments. I focus on differences among the continuities and the particular ways that context informs the conceptual details of my analyses and assessments. I am most interested in issues surrounding mind, language, knowledge, and substance. But I also work on ethics, history of science and medicine, and conceptions of God.
I am happy to supervise projects addressing traditional M&E topics in Berkeley, Locke, Arnauld, Malebranche, Descartes, Suarez, and Montaigne. I am also happy to supervise projects in 16th and 17th-century ethics. I am also happy to supervise projects concerning movements, like the 16th century Averroists, Epicureanism or Eleaticism in the 17th century, or British Platonism in the age of Locke.
I am currently looking for students interested in working on the following projects:
(a) Neo-stoic themes and positions in the 17th century: Lipsius, Charron, Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, Cavendish, Malebranche, Leibniz, Norris, and Astell
(b) Berkeley’s uses of Locke's Account of Sensitive Knowledge
(c) God within Berkeley's Idealism: God as Perceiver?
Recent Publications
Books
(with Margaret Cameron & Robert Stainton). Springer, 2017.
The Language of Nature: Reassessing the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, edited with Geoffrey Gorham and Ed Slowik, in the series Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016).
, edited with Henrik Lagerlund, (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Article
. In The European Legacy 23(5): 583-585 (2018).
rlund, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
