I’m an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. My research focuses on early modern European philosophy. Most of that research is connected to a long-running project, which I sometimes think of as ‘materialism from the Third Objections to the New Essays‘ — that is, philosophical discussions of materialism from Hobbes’s objections to Descartes’s Meditations in 1641, to Leibniz’s objections to Locke’s Essay in the early years of the eighteenth century. There was a long, connected debate there, which I’ve been exploring in a series of papers. Those address topics including Hobbes’s materialism; related views of Hobbes’s such as his philosophy of language; criticisms of materialism by the likes of Cudworth and Leibniz; and the alternative materialist projects of Margaret Cavendish and John Toland. Recently I’ve been thinking more about Locke, though still in the context of that overall project.

Email: sdrd at ufl dot edu for UF things, sdrduncan at gmail dot com for everything else

C.V.: duncan-cv-web.pdf

Publications: for a list of my publications, with links to papers, see my philpeople profile.

Teaching: for information about classes, office hours, etc, please see my UF homepage.