Thomas Holden

Professor
EAP Adviser
Library Liaison

Office Hours

By appointment

Contact Phone

805-893-5452

Office Location

South Hall 5710

Specialization

  • Modern Philosophy

Education

  • PhD, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Research

My research work is in the history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, and focuses largely on issues in the metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion of the empiricist tradition.

Publications

Books

Hobbes's Philosophy of ReligionOxford University Press, 2023

Spectres of False Divinity: Hume’s Moral Atheism. Oxford University Press, 2010

The Architecture of Matter: Galileo to Kant. Oxford University Press, 2004

Selected Articles

"Hume on Modal Discourse," in Yitzhak Melamed & Samuel Newlands, ed., Modality: A History (Oxford University Press, 2024), 148-170

"The Meaning of Philo's Reversal," Journal of the History of Philosophy 61 (2023), 215-235

“Berkeley on Inconceivability and Impossibility,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 98 (2019), 107-22    

“Hobbes on the Function of Evaluative Speech,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 46 (2016), 123-44                    

“Hobbes’s First Cause,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53 (2015), 647-67

“Hume’s Absolute Necessity,” Mind 123 (2014), 377-413  

“Bayle and the Case for Actual Parts,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004), 145-64