Horst, Steven

Steven Horst

Bio

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Steven Horst, PhD is currently the Chair of Philosophy at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, where he has taught since 1990.  He has also been a visiting scholar at the Center for Adaptive Systems at Boston University (1993), Princeton University (1997), and Stanford’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (1998).

His research began in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and has branched out into metaphysics and the interface between philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, particularly the implications for philosophy of mind of the assumptions we make about the nature of laws and explanation.  He is currently finishing off projects critiquing reductive naturalism and examining the nature of laws in psychology and the natural sciences.  The new projects involve articulating a view called "Cognitive Pluralism" and working on an account of concepts that does justice to work on concepts in several scientific disciplines: notably, developmental psychology, cognitive ethology and neural modeling.

He has also taken an interest in moral psychology in recent years, broadly construed as the intersection of theoretical models of the mind/soul/self, ethics and techniques of therapy or self-actualization.  The main focus of this has been in a course called "Moral Psychology: Care of the Soul", but he has also published an article called "Our Animal Bodies" which he hopes to develop into a book for a broad readership when time permits.

Within Wesleyan, he helped found the course cluster in Christian Studies and has been involved in activities exploring how best to study and teach about Christianity within a pluralistic university.  He also spent two years as Wesleyan’s Director of Pedagogical Renewal.  Outside Wesleyan, he plays cello and has been involved in Irish music for almost 20 years.  He is the founder of an academic software company, IntelliGents, LLC, the makers of NoteWorthy Virtual Notecards(tm).