Duke :: Philosophy :: Faculty

Andrew Janiak, Assistant Professor

Andrew Janiak
Contact Info:
Office Location:  201G West Duke Bldg
Office Phone:  +1 919-660-3057, +1 919-660-3050
Email Address:   send me a message

Specialties:

History of Early Modern Philosophy
History and Philosophy of Science
Research Interests:

Janiak earned an M.A. from Michigan while enrolled in its doctoral program, and a Ph.D. from Indiana in 2001, with a Ph.D. minor in history and philosophy of science. He wrote his dissertation under Michael Friedman, Fred Beiser, Paul Franks and Nico Bertoloni Meli.

In 2001-02, Janiak was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT, having previously been a doctoral fellow at Tel Aviv University. He joined the Duke faculty in the fall of 2002.

In 2005-06, Janiak was the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke; last year, he was on leave as a faculty fellow at Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute. He is affiliated with the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Janiak is the new director of Duke's Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, Technology and Medicine.

Work in progress:

  • Isaac Newton (Oxford and Boston: Blackwell), part of the Blackwell Great Minds series edited by Steve Nadler -- under contract.

  • "Nonsense and things in themselves" -- this paper employs an interpretation of the metaphysical deduction in the first Critique to indicate why propositions about things in themselves can be meaningful.

  • "Natural philosophy," Routledge Companion to Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, edited by Daniel Kaufman (London: Routledge), in progress.

  • See here for my letter to the TLS regarding Steven Weinberg's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion.

    Recent and forthcoming publications:

  • Newton as Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming, July 2008). The final draft of the manuscript is now available.

  • "Newton and the Reality of Force," Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (January 2007): 127-147.

  • "Newton's Forces in Kant's Critique," in Michael Dickson and Mary Domski, editors, Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science (Open Court Press, Summer 2008). This volume is in honor of Michael Friedman's work in history and philosophy of science and mathematics.

  • Review of Thomas Holden, The Architecture of Matter (OUP) for Mind 115 (October 2006): 1130-1133.

  • "Newton's Philosophy," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edited by Edward Zalta (Fall 2006 edition).

  • Edited and introduced, Isaac Newton: Philosophical Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2004), xl + 148.

  • "Kant as Philosopher of Science," Perspectives on Science 12 (2004): 339-363.

  • "Space, Atoms and Mathematical Divisibility in Newton," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2000): 203-230.

    Recent and upcoming talks:

  • "Newton as philosopher, the very idea," The 66th CLEA Foundations Lecture, Vrije Universiteit Brussels -- April 2008

  • "Nonsense and things in themselves," Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia -- November 2007.

  • "Isaac Newton's God: theology and physics in the late seventeenth century," Science, Technology and Society Seminar, Columbia University -- October 2007.

  • "Integrating history and philosophy of science: the case of Isaac Newton," First conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science, Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh -- October 2007.

  • "Descartes's Metaphysical Physics and Newton's Physical Metaphysics," International Conference on Newton and Philosophy, Universiteit Leiden, The Netherlands -- June 2007.

  • "Nonsense and Things in Themselves," with commentary by Jennifer Uleman (Purchase College), North American Kant Society, at Central APA, Chicago -- April 2007.

  • "The question of philosophy in Descartes and Newton," Department of Philosophy, Tufts University -- March 2007.

  • Commentator, Symposium on Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, with papers by Lisa Downing (Ohio State) and Jeff McDonough (Harvard), Eastern APA, Washington, DC -- December 2006.

  • Commentator on Alan Gabbey's paper, "The Empirical Credentials of Absolute Space and the Puzzle about Simultaneity: Newton and Huygens," for "Understanding Space and Time," the 3rd Annual Conference on Issues in Modern Philosophy, Department of Philosophy, NYU -- November 2006.

  • "Newton as a critic of Descartes," on panel with Dan Garber, Mary Domski and Eric Schliesser, History of Science Society/Philosophy of Science Association Joint Meeting, Vancouver, Canada -- November 2006.

  • "Do forces exist? Newton and the mechanical philosophy" Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto -- October 2006.

  • "Situating Newton in Philosophical Context," with Nico Bertoloni Meli, Mary Domski, and Eric Schliesser, Sixth International Congress, Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, Ecole normale superieure, Paris -- June 2006.

  • "What Newton Should Have Told Leibniz," The Cartesian Circle, University of California, Irvine -- November 2005.

    Recent and upcoming talks at Duke:

  • "Isaac Newton and our disciplinary predicament," Do Historians and Philosophers of Science Have Anything to Say to Each Other? Conference at Duke University -- March 2007.

  • "What is a canonical text? The complexity of editing Isaac Newton," Producing the Renaissance Text, a conference sponsored by Duke's Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies -- February 2007.

  • "Isaac Newton and the scientific invention of modern philosophy," Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Duke -- March 2006.

  • "Isaac Newton and the boundaries of science," John Hope Franklin Center, Duke -- November 2005.

    Philosophical Writings