Academic Philosophy

I find pre-industrial material culture a fascinating area of research and as a geographer favor landscapes, movement, and distribution. My intellectual orientation is particularly toward the empirical investigation of human historical questions. I stress inference from actual evidence and logical analysis rather than deduction from overarching theory based on a limited empirical foundation.

When it comes to historical issues, I stress the substantially unique and contingent nature of every happening and thus am more a historicist than a nomotheticist. I eschew sociopolitically colored approaches that excessively stress “political correctness” and adopt extreme cultural relativism. My own research efforts espouse largely intellectual rather than applied studies.