About Steven Horst

Steven Horst is Professor of Philosophy at Wesleyan University.

Horst came to Wesleyan in 1990 with a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and a B.A. in Philosophy and Religion from Boston University.  He has been a visiting scholar at Princeton (Philosophy), Stanford (Center for the Study of Language and Information) and Boston University (Center for Adaptive Systems), and has received research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Templeton Foundation.

Publications include four books:  Cognitive Pluralism (MIT Press, 2016), Laws, Mind, and Free Will (MIT Press, 2011), Beyond Reduction: Philosophy of Mind and Post-Reductionist Philosophy of Science (2007), and Symbols, Computation and Intentionality: A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind (1996, reissued in 2011).  Downloadable copies of most academic papers are available through the menu link Downloadable Publications.

Current research interests include Cognitive Pluralism (the thesis that the mind utilizes many special-purpose models for understanding different aspects of the world) and cognitive science of religion.  Two books for general readership are in preparation: What Do Christians Believe? and Exorcizing Laplace’s Demon.

Professor Horst’s personal homepage can be found here.