PHILOSOPHY: faculty
The City University of New York Graduate Center
Catherine Wilson
- Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
- Andrew Heiskell Research Scholar
- Ph.D. Princeton University
- B.Phil. University of Oxford
- B.A. Yale University
Email:
cwilson@gc.cuny.edu
Links:
Research Interests
- 17th and 18th Century History and Philosophy of Science
- Moral and Social Theory
- Philosophy of Literature
Courses Recently Taught
- Egalitarianism: For & Against (Spring 2007)
- Rationalists (Fall 2006)
- Evolution and Ethics (Spring 2006)
- Materialism, Politics and Morals in 17th Century Philosophy (Fall 2005)
Representative Publications
- Moral Animals: Ideals and Constraints in Moral Theory. Oxford University Press, 2004.
- Descartes's Meditations: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
- The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope. Princeton University Press, 1995. 2nd ed. (paperback) 1997.
- Leibniz's Metaphysics: A Historical and Comparative Study. Princeton University Press/Manchester University Press, 1989.
- "What is the Importance of Descartes's Sixth Meditation?" Accepted for publication in Philosophica 74 (2006).
- "Evolutionary Ethics." (12,000 words) To appear in Handbook of the Philosophy of Biology, ed. M. Matthen and C. Stephens, Elsevier, 2006.
- "Love of God and Love of Creatures: The Astell-Masham Debate," History of Philosophy Quarterly, 21 ( 2004).
- "Simone de Beauvoir and Human Dignity." In The Legacy of Simone de Beauvoir, edited by Emily Grosholz, Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 90-114.
- "Kant and Leibniz," Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2004.
- "Epicureanism in Early Modern Philosophy: Leibniz and his Contemporaries," in Brad Inwood and Jon Miller, eds., Hellenistic and Early Modern Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 90-115.
- "Capability and Language in the Novels of Tarjei Vesaas" Philosophy and Literature 27 (2003) pp. 21-39.
- "A Humean Argument for Benevolence to Strangers," Monist 86:3 on Moral Distance, edited by Deen Chatterjee., (2003) p. 454-468.
- "The Role of a Merit Principle in Distributive Justice," Journal of Ethics 7 (2003) pp. 1-38.
- "Morphogenesis, Organisation, Teleology," Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome, 2003.
- "Corpuscular Effluvia: Between Imagination and Experiment," in Claus Zittel and Wolfgang Detel eds., Ideals and Cultures of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe/Wissensideale und Wissenskulturen in der frühen Neuzeit. Concepts, Methods, Historical Conditions and Social Impact. 2 vols., Frankfurt, Akademie-Verlag 2002, pp. 161-184.