Projects

Data Mining: The Critique of Artificial Reason, 1963-2005

with the support of the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations

The Matter of Calculation: Calculating Machines, Innovation, and Thinking about Thinking from Pascal to Babbage

with the support of the National Science Foundation

The Genealogy of Frivolity: Mathematical Formalism and its Discontents in the European Enlightenment

with the support of the Defining Wisdom Project

Working Papers

From Sociability to Vis-Viva: Emilie Du Châtelet on Social and Natural Order

Sovereignty, Genealogy, History: The Technical and Decorous in Leibniz's Courtly Work

Publications

Essay review of Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, (2007), Metascience (forthcoming)

“Philosophy, Space, and Mathematics,” in Aaron Garrett, ed.Routledge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Philosophy

“Improvement for Profit: Calculating Machines and the Prehistory of Intellectual Property,” Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin, eds., Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (Palgrave-MacMillan, forthcoming)

"Matters of Fact [Essay review of Harold Cook, Matters of Exchange (Yale 2007)]" Modern Intellectual History 7,3 (2010): 629-642.

The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz and the Cultivation of Virtue (University of Chicago Press, 2006)

“Three Errors about Indifference: Pascal on the Vacuum, Sociability and Moral Freedom,” Romance Quarterly 50(2003):99-120.

“Writing and Sentiment: Blaise Pascal, the Vacuum and the Pensées,”  Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 32(2001):139-181.

“Descartes' Geometry as Spiritual Exercise,” Critical Inquiry, 28(2001): 40-71; reprinted in Bill Brown, ed. Things. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004): 40-71.