Christopher Yeomans

DR. CHRIS YEOMANS is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. He earned his PhD at the University of California, Riverside in 2005 before joining the Purdue faculty in 2009. He is the author of three monographs, Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency, The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel's Pluralistic Philosophy of Action, and The Politics of German Idealism: Law & Social Change at the Turn of the 19th Century (all from Oxford University Press). His work has been supported by the Purdue Provost’s Faculty Fellowship for Study in a Second Discipline (history), the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Chris is currently engaged in three broad research programs.  The first is a series of papers on Hegel’s natural and mathematical philosophy with Ralph Kaufmann which began with “Math by Pure Thinking: R First and the Divergence of Measures in Hegel’s Philosophy of Mathematics” (European Journal of Philosophy, 2017).  The second is a book manuscript tentatively entitled A Social Ontology of Economic Institutions with Justin Litaker, in which they attempt to understand the ontology of firms, markets, and banks and the normative and explanatory principles of our participation in them.  This work attempts to replace the concepts of property and contract that were formed in the early modern period in response to feudalism with more descriptively and explanatorily adequate concepts of economic activity within contemporary institutions.  The third is a book manuscript on Hegel’s understanding of concepts as forms of self-consciousness which develops the interpretation presented in “Perspective and Logical Pluralism in Hegel” (Hegel Bulletin, 2018).

Chris is a fan of all things two-wheeled, including mountain bikes and motorcycles.