Professor Look's research focuses on the history of modern philosophy, especially on the metaphysics, epistemology and natural philosophy of Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant. Work on Leibniz has resulted in three books: Leibniz and 'Vinculum Substantiale', The Leibniz-Des Bosses Correspondence, a critical edition and translation (with Donald Rutherford), and The Continuum Companion to Leibniz. At the moment, he is engaged in a larger project, which examines Kant's Auseinandersetzung with Leibniz and the Leibnizian tradition. He has edited an anthology of essays that explores the relation between Leibniz and Kant: Leibniz and Kant (Oxford, 2021). And he is at work on a monograph, Leibniz, Kant and the Possibility of Metaphysics, which details Kant's critical reaction to Leibniz. Look also works on a constellation of issues in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science that have evident early modern roots: the nature of substance (or the nature of material constitution), the metaphysics of modality, the nature of causation, and the a priori. He has additional active interests in ancient and medieval philosophy, epistemology, logic, aesthetics and the philosophy of film.
Professor Look has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Stiftung. He spent 2011-12 at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) as the Hans Kohn Member of the School of Historical Studies. Professor Look was awarded a research fellowship for 2012-13 from the National Endowment for the Humanities, which he spent in Germany at the Universität Bielefeld and the Leibniz Archives in Hanover.
Professor Look received the College of Arts & Sciences' Outstanding Teaching Award for 2006-07. In Spring 2011 he was named University Research Professor. He now has the Otis A. Singletary Chair in the Humanities in the College of Arts & Sciences.
