Elliot Samuel Paul

Education

• BA, University of Toronto
• PhD, Yale University

Specializations / Research Interests

Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Creativity

Personal Website

About

My research spans three areas: (1) the history of early modern philosophy, (2) contemporary epistemology, and (3) the philosophy and cognitive science of creativity. Much of my work in the first two areas focuses on the phenomenon of clarity, or clear perception. This project develops along two parallel tracks.

(1) The first track is historical, as I analyze the role that clarity plays for Descartes and other figures stretching back to the Stoics. This project culminates in a book, Clarity First: Re-envisioning Descartes’s Epistemology (forthcoming 2026, Oxford). 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 it is, what it does, and how we get it.

(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 illuminates 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, inference, and even freedom.

(3) In my third area of research—creativity—I explore questions such as: What is creativity? Can it be explained? Does being creative involve a distinctive kind of agency, or even freedom? My current projects include a monograph called Creative Agency, to be co-authored with Dustin Stokes, under contract with Oxford.

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

Book

• Clarity First: Re-envisioning Descartes’s Epistemology (Forthcoming 2026) Oxford University Press.

Edited Book

• The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays (2014) with Scott Barry Kaufman, Oxford University Press.

Selected Journal Articles

• “Agency and Objectivity: Gomesian Faith, Cartesian Clarity, or both?” (Forthcoming) Canadian Journal of Philosophy.

• “The Rational Force of Clarity: Descartes’s Rejection of Psychologism” (2024) Res Philosophica 101 (3):431–457.

• “Creativity” (2023) with Dustin Stokes, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman. URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creativity/

• “Cartesian Intuition” (2022) British Journal of the History of Philosophy, pp. 1-31.

• “Cartesian Clarity” (2020) Philosophers’ Imprint, 20(19), pp. 1-28.

• “Descartes’s Anti-Transparency and the Need for Radical Doubt” (2018) Ergo, 5(41), pp. 1083-1129.

• “Creativity and Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders Across the Arts and Sciences” (2014) with Scott Barry Kaufman, Frontiers in Psychology, 5(1145), pp. 1-4.

Selected Book Chapters

• “Historical Treatments of Creativity in the Western Tradition” (Forthcoming) in Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity, edited by Amy Kind and Julia Langkau, Oxford University Press.

• “Descartes’s Clarity First Epistemology” (Forthcoming) in Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup, and Kurt Sylvan.

• “Descartes’s Method for Achieving Knowledge” (Forthcoming) in Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd edition, edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, Matthias Steup, and Kurt Sylvan.

• “Attributing Creativity” (2018) with Dustin Stokes, in Creativity and Philosophy, edited by Berys Gaut and Matthew Kieran, Routledge, pp. 193-210.

• “Naturalistic Approaches to Creativity” (2016) with Dustin Stokes, in The Blackwell Companion to Experimental Philosophy, edited by Justin Sytsma and Wesley Buckwalter. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 318-333.

• “Introducing The Philosophy of Creativity” (2014) with Scott Barry Kaufman, in The Philosophy of Creativity: New Essays(above), pp. 3-16.

Reviews

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

Public Philosophy

• Contribution to roundtable “On Art and Artificial Intelligence” (2023), with Dustin Stokes, in Aesthetics for Birds.

• “Computer creativity is a matter of agency” (2021), with Dustin Stokes, in Institute of Arts and Ideas.

Book in progress

• Creative Agency, with Dustin Stokes, under contract with Oxford University Press.