Most underrated philosopher of the week: Rebecca Copenhaver

When I entered the job-market with a dissertation on Adam Smith (as well as Newton, Hume, and some Rousseau), I discovered that even when I was being introduced for job-talks this fact could trigger snickering or worse. Despite the best efforts of Steve Darwall and Sam Fleischacker, I still encounter the prejudice that Smith is not a philosopher or, worse, that if one works on Smith one must be a right wing lunatic (this is not to deny there are right wing lunatics that work on Smith). This sad experience did not prevent me from developing an equally noxious prejudice that folk working on Reid must be religious zealots; it didn't help that in my perception many Reid-fans would have some secret code that was tied together by snarky comments about Hume. (I really had no excuse for holding any such view because I knew Norman Daniels and his monograph on Reid since before I went to graduate school!) Luckily, I have been disabused of my stupidity by the terrific work of this week's most underrated, Rebecca Copenhaver, (and later many others).

In addition to being one of the world's experts on Kant's reception in Italy, Copenhaver is the world's leading authority on Reid's philosophy of mind. But her interest is clearly not antiquarian. On the contrary, she explores the details of Reid's approach dialectically to develop her own philosophy of mind (see here for a convenient set of links to her publications). (So her profile fits the rules for this category perfectly.) This approach to history (where the dead philosopher is alive as an interlocutor) is still reasonably common among ethicists (and continental philosophers), but, leaving aside folk that work on 'early analytic', fairly uncommon in philosophy of mind and metaphysics (although Della Rocca's work on Spinoza also springs to mind). 

Her brilliant paper on Reid's philosophy of science is my favorite. It may be her most historical piece (although laced with references to Dretske, Nagel, etc); it describes Reid's brilliant re-articulation, if not outright re-invention [although I claim building on Berkeley in various ways], of the manner in which Newtonian natural philosophy could provide an explanatory model for other kinds of sciences. The significance of the paper is not merely exegetical; Reid's way of thinking about science has become so entrenched that we often fail to see how innovative it was. Not knowing Reid means being ignorant of how our world came to be; the joke was on me all along!