Nabeel Hamid

I have broad interests in the history of philosophy. My primary research focus is German philosophy from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. My main project deals with the reception of Descartes in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth century German universities--a phenomenon sometimes called 'Cartesian Scholasticism.' The project traces developments in method and metaphysics in the German scholastic tradition from Johann Clauberg (1622-65) to Christian Wolff (1679-1754). I also write on Kant, often with an eye to his German scholastic background. 

I also work on nineteenth-century German philosophy, especially on Wilhelm Dilthey's (1833-1911) account of historical science--its psychological foundations, its relation to natural scientific explanation, and its critical and empiricist underpinnings. This project aims to situate Dilthey's 'critique of historical reason' in the context of a) the emergence of new empirical sciences of human nature in nineteenth-century Germany, such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology; and b) contemporaneous currents in German philosophy to interpret the new scientific situation, such as positivism, idealism, materialism, and neo-Kantianism. 

I also have interests in medieval philosophy (Latin and Arabic). I am particularly interested in theories of causation in figures such as Avicenna, Averroes, Buridan, and Suarez, and the transformation of the Aristotelian causal framework in this tradition.