About

Our Members

Benjamin Hill

University of Western Ontario

He received his PhD from the University of Iowa in 2003. His work focuses primarily on the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries and ranges across ethics and the natural law, the philosophy of mind and language, and traditional M&E. 

Corey Dyck

University of Western Ontario

Prof. Dyck specializes in the history of German philosophy, with an emphasis on the eighteenth century.

Lorne Falkenstein

University of Western Ontario

Lorne is emeritus professor of philosophy at Western. He works on issues related to spatial perception and temporal experience in the work of early modern philosophers. He has further interests in the spin-off topics of mental representation and liberty/determinism in early modern philosophy and a passing interest in Hume’s moral psychology, his political theory, and his views on religion.

Benjamin Formanek

University of Western Ontario

Benjamin’s focuses on late 17th and early 18th century epistemology and metaphysics. His research interests broadly lie in conceptions of agency, causation, the will, and moral responsibility. George Berkeley’s views on the intersection of human agency and perception occupy his current focus. Outside of early-modern scholarship, he has philosophical interests in blame and responsibility, contemporary discussions of philosophy of action, and meta ethics

Dennis Klimchuk 

University of Western Ontario

Prof. Klimchuk’s main research interests are in philosophy of law (especially but not only private law theory) and the history of political philosophy. He is particularly interested in issues in which these two overlap. Something he has been pursing from a few directions is the idea that there is a category of actions taken within but in abuse of right, which idea suggests interesting conceptual links among a number of doctrines in private and public law and all of those with principles of the rule of law. He has also been working on some questions in Hobbes and on his sabbatical next year he plans to start work on a book about an idea in Grotius’s account of property.

Tyler Lee

University of Western Ontario

Tyler has a broad interest in Western Early Modern Philosophy and is currently focused on examining the principles and implications of Berkeleyan idealism. He also has done prior work on Kant, specifically concentrated on theories of punishment and their relation to human dignity. Aside from his scholarship, he enjoys grappling with problems in normative ethics, justice, and political philosophy.

Fabio Malfara

University of Western Ontario

Fabio is a fourth-year doctoral student interested in issues at the intersection of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind in the history of Cartesianism. Specifically, his work focuses on the relation of the Cartesian doctrine of substance dualism to problems concerning the mind-body union, mind-body causation, and sensory representation.

James Mackey

University of Western Ontario

James’s research focuses on ethics and moral psychology in Descartes and other Cartesian-inspired thinkers such as Princess Elisabeth, Malebranche, Norris, and Astell. He is particularly interested in the way these figures (and others) use Neo-Stoic concepts in their discussions of moral philosophy. His thesis attempts to map out a characterization of Neo-Stoicism by looking at the writings of Justus Lipsius and other late sixteenth century Stoics, and then seeks to apply this framework to some of the ethical writings of Descartes and Malebranche.

Mary Helen McMurran 

University of Western Ontario

Prof. McMurran researches and teaches eighteenth-century literature. She is currently working on a second book which explores the idea of embodied soul in early eighteenth-century lyric poetry and philosophy. Her articles have appeared in ELH, Cambridge Critical Concepts, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Novel: A Forum on Fiction and The Translator. 

Nicholas Michieli

University of Western Ontario

I’m a PhD Candidate in the Philosophy Department at Western University, and my main research area is early modern philosophy. I’m especially interested in the theory of the infinite developed by Aristotle, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Newton and Leibniz. I’m also interested in the notion of substance from Scholasticism through Kant, as well as the a priori and categories. My Doctoral dissertation is a monographic study of a puzzle in G. W. Leibniz’s metaphysics called the Problem of Monadic Aggregation. It is situated within Leibniz’s theory of matter/body.

Robert Stainton

University of Western Ontario

Sijie Yang

University of Western Ontario

Jack Zaluski

University of Western Ontario

I am in the third year of my undergraduate degree in the honour’s specialization in philosophy program at the University of Western Ontario. My philosophical interests are in the history of philosophy broadly, though I enjoy the Early Modern and Ancient Greek periods the most with my favourite philosopher being Plato.