Contact information

Email: Emily Carson
Tel.: 514-398-6065
Office: LEA 936
Office Hours (Fall 2009): Tues. and Thurs.: 11:15 - 12:25; 1:15 - 2:15

Address:
Department of Philosophy
McGill University
Leacock Building
855 Sherbrooke St. W.
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 2T7

Secretary of the Canadian Philosophical Association: 2002-4

Degrees

MA, McGill University, 1989
PhD, Harvard University, 1996

Teaching and research areas

Kant
Early Modern Philosophy
History and Philosophy of Mathematics
History and Philosophy of Science

Current research projects

Very broadly speaking, I am interested in the impact on philosophy of developments in mathematics and science in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries. My current long-term project is to write a book-length examination of Kant's philosophy of mathematics with the general goal of establishing the underappreciated role, indeed the centrality, of Kant's reflections on mathematical knowledge and the mathematical method in the development of his Critical philosophy as articulated in his Critique of Pure Reason. In the shorter term, I am working on a paper in which I attempt to extend the reading of Kants philosophy of geometry in my paper "Kant on intuition in geometry" (see above) to the case of arithmetic, and a paper examining Leibnizs critique of Lockes account of mathematics in the New Essays.

Current teaching

I am on leave in the academic year 2003-2004.

Selected publications

"Metaphysics, mathematics and the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible in Kant's Inaugural Dissertation", forhcoming in Journal of the History of Philosophy.

"Locke and Kant on mathematical knowledge", forthcoming in Intuition and the Axiomatic Method, ed. Renate Huber and Emily Carson.

"Lockes account of certain and demonstrative knowledge", British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10(3), August 2002, pp.359-78.

"Kant on the method of mathematics", Journal of the History of Philosophy, October 1999, volume XXXVII, no. 4.

"Kant on intuition in geometry", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol.27, Number 4, December, 1997, pp.489-512.

"On realism in set theory", Philosophia Mathematica (3) vol.4 (1996), pp.3-18.