Elliot Samuel Paul

Education

• BA, University of Toronto
• PhD, Yale University

Specializations / Research Interests

Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Creativity

Personal Website

About

Before joining the faculty at Queen's in 2018, I was a Bersoff Fellow at New York University and then Assistant Professor at Barnard College of Columbia University. 

My past and emerging work falls into three areas: (1) the history of early modern philosophy, (2) contemporary epistemology, and (3) the philosophy of creativity. Much of my research in the first two areas is focused on the phenomenon of clarity, or clear perception. This work proceeds along two parallel tracks. 

(1) The first track is historical, as I expose and explicate the role that clarity plays for Descartes and other figures going back to the Stoics. This project culminates in a book, Clarity First: Rethinking Descartes’s Epistemology (under contract with Oxford University Press). I argue that clarity is the central notion in Descartes’s epistemology and indeed in his philosophy as a whole. On my reading, every epistemic notion Descartes posits is either defined or explained in terms of clarity. Thus I attempt to systematically reinterpret his epistemology by unpacking his views on clarity: what clarity is, what clarity does, and how we make our ideas clear.

(2) The notion of "clear (and distinct) perception" has fallen out of favour in modern philosophy, but in new work I argue that we need to bring it back. I think the right conception of clarity sheds light on a wide range of philosophical concerns, including cognitive phenomenology, perception and perceptual bias, reasons for belief (and reasons for doubt), introspection (and its limits), self-knowledge, intuition, and inference.

(3) In my third area of research, on creativity, I'm interested in questions like these: What is creativity? Can it be explained? Does being creative involve a certain kind of agency, or even freedom?

I am on research leave for the 2022-23 academic year.

Book

• Clarity First: Rethinking Descartes’s Epistemology (under contract with Oxford University Press)

Edited Book

• The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (Oxford University Press, 2014). [pdf]

Selected Journal Articles

• “Creativity” (2023), with Dustin Stokes, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/
• “Cartesian Intuition” (2022) in British Journal of the History of Philosophy, pp. 1-31. [pdf]
• “Cartesian Clarity” (2020) Philosophers’ Imprint, 20(19), pp. 1-28. [pdf]
• “Descartes’s Anti-Transparency and the Need for Radical Doubt” (2018) Ergo, 5(41), pp. 1083-1129. [pdf]
• “Creativity and Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders Across the Arts and Sciences” (2014), with Scott Barry Kaufman, Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1145), pp. 1-4.

Selected Chapters in Books

• “Attributing Creativity”, with Dustin Stokes, in Creativity and Philosophy, edited by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, Routledge (2018), pp. 193-210. [pdf]
• “Naturalistic Approaches to Creativity”, with Dustin Stokes, in The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, edited by Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell (2016), pp. 318-333. [pdf]
• “Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity”, with Scott Barry Kaufman, in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (above) (2014), pp. 3-16. [pdf]

Reviews

• “Review of Rafaella De Rosa’s Descartes and the Puzzle of Sensory Representation”, with John Morrison, Mind (2014) v.123, pp. 1187-1191. [pdf]

Public Philosophy

• "Computer creativity is a matter of agency", with Dustin Stokes, in Institute of Arts and Ideas.

Work in progress

• “Descartes’s Epistemology”, commissioned for Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup, and Kurt Sylvan.
• “Descartes and Leibniz on Intuition”, commissioned for a special issue of British Journal of the History of Philosophy.
• (paper on epistemic norms), commissioned for volume on Normative Realism, co-edited by Paul Boghossian and Christopher Peacocke, contract pending at OUP.