Karen Detlefsen has two primary research projects. One project focuses on the relation between the  life sciences and metaphysics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, specifically tracing the  evolution of the concepts of mechanism, teleology, individuation, and laws in the metaphysics of  Descartes, Malebranche, Leibniz, Albrecht von Haller, and Caspar Friedrich Wolff as each one tries  to explain the generation of new organisms. Her second project focuses on early modern women  philosophers, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, and Émilie Du Châtelet.  She is particularly interested in Cavendish's metaphysics and natural philosophy, including their  relation to her political philosophy (especially as implied in Cavendish’s fictional works). She is also  collaborating with Andrew Janiak (Duke) on Du Châtelet's natural philosophy, its conceptual  relation to the work of Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff and Newton, her historical role in the emergence  of modern science, and the gendered context of the sciences in the early modern period.