I’m an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Florida. My research focuses on early modern European philosophy.
Most of my 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
For information about classes, office hours, etc, please see my UF homepage.
Selected publications
- “Toland and Locke in the Leibniz-Burnett Correspondence”. Locke Studies 17 (2017): 117-41.
- “Hobbes, Universal Names, and Nominalism”, in Stefano Di Bella & Tad M. Schmaltz (ed.), The Problem of Universals in Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- “Hobbes on Language: Propositions, Truth, and Absurdity”, in A. P. Martinich & Kinch Hoekstra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes (Oxford University Press, 2016) 57-72.
- “Leibniz on the Expression of God”. Ergo 2 (2015): 83-103.
- “Leibniz’s Mill Arguments Against Materialism”, Philosophical Quarterly 62 (2012): 250-72.
- “Debating Materialism: Cavendish, Hobbes, and More”, History of Philosophy Quarterly 29 (2012): 391-409.
For a complete list of publications, see my publications page or my philpeople profile.
