I am an associate professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure PSL University (Paris) and a fellow of the CHU this semester. As a historian of late scholastic and early modern philosophy, I have been working primarily on Suárez, Descartes and Leibniz and on issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind and action. In my research, I try to engage in a fruitful dialogue between history of philosophy and systematic philosophy.
During my stay at the Centre, I will pursue a research project on the controversy between Descartes and Gassendi and more particularly on the metaphysics and epistemology of essences. Their debate raises a host of questions: What are essences? Do all kinds of objects have essences? How can essences be known?