Faculty Profiles

Thaddeus Robinson

Professor, Philosophy
Department Chair
Philosophy
484-664-3071

[email protected]

Education

  • Ph. D., Purdue University
  • M.A., Northern Illinois University
  • B.A., Luther College

Teaching Interests

As a teacher, I seek to help students identify and develop their own questions as well as the skills and habits of mind to effectively pursue the answers. One of these skills I call “cooperative engagement” which is a form of communication that has at its heart a shared effort to learn, understand, figure out or decide something. To see the value of this form of communication is to recognize that knowledge and understanding are social, and that it is to our benefit to seek cooperative engagement and to foster it among others.

Research, Scholarship or Creative/Artistic Interests

I have three broad areas of academic interest: 17th and 18th century European philosophy, particularly the work of Baruch Spinoza, the Philosophy of Religion broadly construed, and applied epistemology and the ethics of information. 

  • Ancient Greek Philosophy
  • Formal Logic
  • Philosophy and Spirituality
  • Philosophy Internship: County Controller
  • Philosophy Internship: TurnUp Activism
  • Philosophy Internship: TurnUpActivism
  • Principles of Reasoning & Argument
  • Problems of Evil
  • Muhlenberg College Summer Research Grant (June 2020).
  • Muhlenberg College Course Development Grant (Summer 2016)
  • Chosen to participate in the Mellon International Faculty Seminar and Travel Grant for Bangladesh: Contested Identities, Spring 2016

Book

  • Arguments in Context: An Introduction to Critical Thinking. Allentown, PA: Muhlenberg College, 2021. (Open Textbook)

Peer-Reviewed Articles

  • “The Problem of the Unknown Attributes” International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion (forthcoming)
  • “Spinoza and the Possibility of Adequate Ideas” Journal of Modern Philosophy (forthcoming)
  • “The Prospects for Debunking Non-Theistic Belief,” Sophia 60: 83–89, 2021.
  • “Identifying Spinoza’s Immediate Infinite Mode of Extension” Dialogue 53 (2): 315-340, 2014.
  • “Descartes’s Sceptical Theism” Religious Studies 49 (4):515-527, 2013.
  • “17th Century Theories of Substance” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ISSN 2161-0002, http://www.iep.utm.edu/, 2011 (approx 10,000 words).
  • “Spinoza on the Vacuum and the Simplicity of Corporeal Substance” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26 (1): 63-81, 2009.

Select Refereed Conference Presentations

  • “Quantity and Spatial Extension in Spinoza’s Ethics,” meeting of the North American Spinoza Society at the Central APA, Chicago, Feb. 2020.
  • “The Problem of the Unknown Attributes,” Society for the Philosophy of Religion annual conference Hilton Head, SC, Feb. 2019.
  • “Yes, there is a Problem of Contingency for Religious Beliefs,” Eastern Pennsylvania Philosophical Association (EPPA) meeting, King’s College, April 2016.
  • “Modest Modal Skepticism and the Problem of Evil”, British Society for the Philosophy of Religion, Oriel College Oxford, Sept. 2015.

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