Ian McKeachie

I joined the Princeton philosophy department in 2017. Prior to that, I received bachelor’s degrees from Columbia University and L’Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris; the former in philosophy and political science, and the latter in Middle Eastern studies.

I work on the history of philosophy, primarily on Kant. My current research focuses on Kant’s evolving relationship to the Leibnizian Principle of Sufficient Reason. I trace Kant’s trajectory from early defenses of the principle to the eventual restriction of it in his critical work, looking at how critiques of the PSR by figures like Christian August Crusius affected Kant’s thinking over time. I argue that an emergent tension between the Principle of Sufficient Reason and free will, first made salient to Kant through Crusius’s work, underlies the doctrine of transcendental idealism and Kant’s mature approach to the science of metaphysics.

I have secondary research interests in Islamic philosophy, particularly the occasionalism of Al-Ghazali and its subsequent critique by Ibn Rushd. I am interested in the largely unrecognized ways that medieval Islamic thought worked its way into the Western philosophical tradition, coloring philosophical discourse up through the early modern period.

I can be reached at [email protected].