I am a Professor of Philosophy at Utah Valley University where I have been teaching since the summer of 2012. I received my PhD in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in the spring of 2012 and spent the 2011-2012 academic year as a visiting graduate student fellow at Notre Dame.
My main research interests are in seventeenth-century philosophy. My work has focused primarily on René Descartes, Nicolas Malebranche, Elisabeth of Bohemia, and Antoine Arnauld. I have also published pieces that engage substantially with Blaise Pascal, Pierre Nicole and Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly. I am currently working on several projects on Mary Astell. More information on my research interests is available here.
My book, The Philosophy of Antoine Arnauld, was published in December (2025) with Cambridge University Press. This is the first monograph on Arnauld’s systematic philosophical thought in English. Arnauld was a very influential figure in early modern Europe but is primarily remembered as a keen interlocutor of Descartes, Leibniz and Malebranche. One central theme in the book is that Arnauld follows a careful, albeit subtle, method. Once this is established, his philosophy comes into focus, proves systematic, and offers many novel contributions to enlightenment-era thought.
I regularly teach courses on early modern philosophy, including survey courses and various topics courses. Among the topics courses I’ve taught, some focus on the work of particular historical figures, (e.g., Scotus, Ockham and Descartes, or Spinoza and Kant), while others examine a single topic/issue or a set of related issues in the period (e.g., method, mind and morality; or correspondence and controversies). I also teach courses on medieval philosophy, metaphysics, environmental ethics, epistemology, logic, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, and food and animal ethics. More information on my teaching is available here.
Eric Stencil 