Clara Carus
Research Interests: I am specialized in Early Modern Philosophy with a particular focus on Émilie Du Châtelet, Leibniz, Wolff and Kant. I work on metaphysics, in particular on the principles of knowledge (PC and PSR) and the concepts of time and space.
Reason for Harvard Visit: I am a Feodor Lynen Fellow at Harvard working on a project entitled "Émilie Du Châtelet's epistemological approach to space and time".
I studied in Freiburg, Oxford and Harvard and gained my PhD with a summa cum laude in Freiburg in 2018 with a book on Heidegger and Kant concerning the concept of time. From 2018-2020, I was a postdoc at Harvard University with a project on the exclusion of the senses from the root of scientific knowledge in the early modern rationalists leading up to Kant, in particular in Descartes, Leibniz and Du Châtelet. From 2020-2022, I was Assistant Professor at the philosophy department at the University of Paderborn. During this time, I worked with Jeffrey McDonough on the project "Émilie Du Châtelet in Relation to Leibniz and Wolff - Similarities and Differences" (Springer 2025). In 2023, I was Associate Faculty and Postdoc at the University of Oxford with a book project on the PSR in Du Châtelet (Springer 2025). From October 2023 to July 2024, I was head of a DFG research project on Du Châtelet's theory of hypotheses in relation to the principles of knowledge at the University of Paderborn. This has culminated in a collected volume on "Du Châtelet's Scientific Methodology", which I am editing together with Peter Anstey, forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Currently, I am completing a monograph entitled "Émilie Du Châtelet's Early Modern Metaphysics".