Profile
Laura Keating received her B.A. in Philosophy and Mathematics from Michigan State University in 1985, and her Ph.D. from The Ohio State University in 1993. She has been at Hunter College since September of 1993. She was chair of the Philosophy Department from 2010-2016.
Her area of specialization is the history of early modern philosophy, with particular interest in philosophical accounts of the senses and sensible qualities developed to accommodate emerging mechanistic approaches to nature. Besides courses in early modern philosophy, she teaches courses in the philosophy of science, theory of knowledge, perception, and symbolic logic, as well as introductory courses in philosophy, ethics and logic.
She has published articles appearing in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Locke Studies, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and History of Philosophy Quarterly on mechanism and the senses in Descartes and Locke, and the nature and basis of the related distinction between primary and secondary qualities as developed by Boyle and Locke. Her most recent publications include an article on the nature of Thomas Reid's distinction between sensation and perception, "Reidian Conception and Object-Directedness: Moving Beyond the Framework of Intentionality," in the Journal of the History of Philosophy (Vol. 57, No. 1 (January 2019): 81-105), and a book chapter on Robert Boyle's notion and account of qualities, forthcoming in the Bloomsbury Companion to Boyle.