Allison Kuklok Associate Professor of Philosophy

Bio

Ph.D. Harvard University
B.A. Wellesley College

Areas of Expertise:

Early Modern Philosophy, Kant, Metaphysics, Ethics

Courses I Teach:

Self and World
Early Modern Philosophy
Kant

Research

I am currently exploring Boyle’s influence on Locke, specifically with respect to their respective accounts of kinds, essences and classification. I am also working on a paper in which I suggest a friendly amendment to the received view on Hume’s account of necessary connection. I argue that what might be called the philosophical notion of necessary connection can be traced to something other than the feeling that accompanies casual inference, namely, to our idea of logical necessity.

Awards & Recognition

Recipient of the Hume Society Young Scholars Award, July 2013.

Member of the American Philosophical Association Member of the International Hume Society

Professor Kuklok presented her paper “More than a Feeling” at the 40th Annual International Hume Society Conference in Belo Horizonte, Brazil on July 25th, 2013.

Recent News

Allison Kuklok of the philosophy faculty learned in December that she is the recipient of a prestigious, highly competitive $60,000 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) year-long Fellowship, which she will use to work on a book about the status of the human being in John Locke’s natural philosophy. She said a big part of her project will look at Locke’s views on language, and how language informs our picture of the world. “Locke was living in a time of great conflict and upheaval, and he thought that some of the sources of disagreement that he saw in politics, religion, and philosophy could be remedied if only we were more careful about how we form our beliefs, and how we attach meanings to our words,” she said. “One ambition of my project is to better understand these remedies, possibly with an eye to thinking about the sources of political disagreement in our own time.” An NEH state-by-state listing of the recent round of grants reveals Kuklok to be the only Fellowship recipient in Vermont, and one of 75 out of 1027 approved fellowship applications. The full title of her funded project is: “The Status of Man in John Locke’s Natural Philosophy.” Here is the “Project Description”: “Research and writing leading to a book on John Locke’s (1632–1704) natural philosophy.”
(posted February 2020)