Biography:

I am an ARC Post-Doctoral Fellow (early career researcher) in the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney, with a PhD in Philosophy from Boston University and an earlier graduate degree from the Universit de Paris-IV Sorbonne. I work chiefly on the history and philosophy of biology and medicine in the Enlightenment and the early modern period. I have published articles on La Mettrie, Diderot, Locke and medicine, the concept of organism, brain and mind, and determinism, co-authored a review essay on Darwin in Metascience (2009); I have edited Monsters and Philosophy (2005; see www.monstersandphilosophy.com ), a special issue of Science in Context entitled Vitalism without Metaphysics?, on eighteenth-century medical thought (2008); in preparation are 2 co-edited volumes: a book entitled Embodied Empiricism (forthcoming December 2009) and a special issue of Hist. and Phil. of the Life Sciences on Organism (2010).

Abstract: