Research interests
Theories of human sociability, German natural law, criticism of natural law, human needs and natural law, Christian Thomasius, Pufendorf, Rousseau, Kant, J.G. Fichte, legal positivism, war and peace in natural legal thought, pre-Grotian humanist natural law
 

Projects
Laws for Desirous Beings: Anthropology, Sociability and the Crisis of Natural Right in German Enlightenment Thought
Natural law teaching at Jena, c. 1740-1820

Selected bibliography concerning Natural law

(with Eva Piirimäe) ‘Introduction: Between Morality and Anthropology—Sociability in Enlightenment Thought’ in Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. Eva Piirimäe and Alexander Schmidt, special issue of History of European Ideas 41 (2015), p. 571-588.

‘Unsocial sociability and the crisis of natural law: Michael Hissmann on the state of nature’ in Sociability in Eighteenth-Century Thought, ed. Eva Piirimäe and Alexander Schmidt, special issue of History of European Ideas 41 (2015), p. 619-639.

‘Sources of evil or seeds of the good? Rousseau and Kant on needs, the arts, and the sciences’ in Responses to Rousseau: Reaction and Interpretation from the Eighteenth Century to the Present, ed. Avi Lifschitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2016), p. 33-55.

‘Neo-Epikureismus und die Krise des Naturrechts: Michael Hißmann (1752-1784) über Naturzustand und Gerechtigkeit’, in Aufklärung 25 (2014), p. 159-182.

‘Freedom and State Action in German Late Enlightenment Thought’ in Freedom and the Construction of Europe, ed. Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 208-226.