In the picture, we were trying to feel the way people had felt 150 years ago, imagining the excitement and almost fear of being photographed for the first time in a 19th-century studio. My interest in the history of philosophy, however, is not motivated by the desire to understand how the historical figures felt. Rather, I have always been motivated to look for the principles driving a given author throughout his works, to identify a thread that is common to different modes of presentation.

When working on the English Dominican Robert Kilwardby (1215–79) for my doctoral dissertation, it was surprising to find how he used different influences such as Aristotle and St Augustine to justify his view of the soul and the nature of the human person. I had always thought that thinkers developed their theories according to their intellectual influences, and that a new influence led them to a change of perspective. Instead, it is often the case that the underlying thought remains the same and the different influences are used to defend rather than change it.

It is our task to discover this common thread, if there is one. To do so, we need to painstakingly study their thought, understanding their individual development in context, come to grasp the questions that interested them, the answers they offered to these questions, and the arguments presented to support those answers. That is what philosophy does, whether the focus is on historical figures or not, and that certainly is what I want to do.

My current research focuses on the notion of active perception in the Augustinian tradition and the way authors in this tradition deal with relevant questions of perceptual experience: what is the nature of perceptual acts?, what explains non-veridical perceptions?, what is the relationship between the senses and the intellect?, do beliefs (habits and education) play a role in perception?, etc. By answering these questions (and others), my team and I hope to provide a more detailed and systematic account of the models of cognition that developed in the period 1250-1550.