Alan Nelson works primarily in early modern philosophy.  This year he is teaching graduate courses on early modern moral science and on Donald Davidson.  In recent years, Nelson  has directed dissertations on Leibniz, Spinoza, Newton, Berkeley, Hume, Mental Causation, Descartes, and Locke.

           Representative publications include: "Cartesian Actualism in the Leibniz-Arnauld Correspondence," Canadian Journal of Philosophy (1993); "How Could Scientific Facts be Socially Constructed?" Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science (1994); "Micro-chaos and Idealization in Cartesian Physics," Philosophical Studies (1995); "The Falsity in Sensory Ideas: Descartes and Arnauld," Interpreting Arnauld, ed. by Kremer (1996. U. of Toronto Press); "Descartes' Ontology of Thought," Topoi (1997); "Circumventing Cartesian Circles," (with Lex Newman) Noûs (1999); "Cognition and Modality in Descartes," (with David Cunning) Acta Philosophica Fennica (1999); "Two Concepts of Idealisation in Economics," The Economic World View, ed. by Maki (2001, CUP); "The Rationalist Impulse," "Leibniz on Modality, Cognition, and Expression," and "Proust and the Rationalist Conception of the Self," A Companion to Rationalism, ed. by Nelson (2005, Blackwell); "Proofs for the Existence of God," (with Larry Nolan) A Guide to Descartes' Meditations ed. by Gaukroger (2005, Blackwell); "Cartesian Innateness," A Companion to Descartes ed. by Broughton and Carriero (2008, Blackwell);  "Divisibility and Cartesian Extension," (with Kurt Smith) Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, 2010: 1-24; "Qualities and Simple Ideas: Hume and his Debt to Berkeley" (with David Landy) in Primary and Secondary Qualities ed by Nolan (2011, OUP); "How Many Worlds?," British Journal for History of Philosophy (2011); "Descartes's Logic and the Paradox of Deduction," (with Brian Rogers) in The Giants of Early Modern Philosophy ed. by Easton (forthcoming, U. of Toronto Press); "Descartes on Logic and Knowledge" in  A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy  ed. by Kaufman (forthcoming, Routledge 2012); "The Structure of Cartesian Sensations," forthcoming in Analytic Philosophy.