Project Staff

Helen De Cruz is postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leuven. She obtained her PhD  on naturalistic approaches in the philosophy of mathematics at the Free University Brussel in 2007. Her main interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology and philosophy of science. Most of her published work deals with the relationship between intuitive modes of reasoning, cognitive biases and formalized modes of reasoning, including mathematics and science. Her current research examines how intuitive probability assessments play a role in scientific understanding.

David's research is in philosophy of language, decision theory, and meta-ethics. He received his PhD from MIT in 2008. His publications include `The Problem of Noncounterfactual Conditionals', Philosophy of Science (Dec 2009, vol. 76, no. 5).

Christoph Kelp joined the Formal Epistemology Project as a postdoctoral research fellow in July 2008. He completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Free University Berlin and University of Leuven and his master’s degree also in philosophy at the Universities of St. Andrews and Stirling. In 2007 he obtained his Ph.D. for a thesis entitled A Minimalist Approach to Epistemology under the supervision of Duncan Pritchard from the University of Stirling. Kelp’s research focuses mainly on epistemology and he has published a number of papers in this field and in related areas. In the second semester of the academic year 2008/2009 he will be teaching W0EA3A—Theory of Knowledge to bachelor’s students of the international programme at University of Leuven. For more information, visit his website.

Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson joined the Formal Epistemology Project in July 2008. He is a Senior Research Fellow of the IEG, the research group on the Philosophy of Information at the Computing Laboratory at the University of Oxford, and a Research Member of the GPI at the University of Hertfordshire. He has previously been a Stipendiary Lecturer in Philosophy at St Anne's College at the University of Oxford, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Tilburg Institute of Logic and Philosophy of Science. He completed his BA (HONS) and MPhil (thesis: Two-Dimensional Semantics and Doxastic Reports) at The University of Sydney, where he was supervised by David Braddon-Mitchell and Michael McDermott. He completed his BPhil (2005) and DPhil (2008) at Balliol College with the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford (thesis: Information and Logical Equivalence), where he was supervised by Timothy Williamson and Luciano Floridi, and examined by Volker Halbach and Johan van Benthem. He is co-author (with Maricarmen Martinez) of the forthcoming entry on Logic and Information in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He has published his work in journals such as Linguistic Analysis, The Review of Symbolic Logic, Synthese, The Journal of Philosophical Logic, Minds and Machines, Logique et Analyse, and annuals such as The Logica Yearbook. He is co-editor (with Luciano Floridi) of The Philosophy of Information and Logic, a special issue of the Knowledge Rationality and Action section of Synthese. He also writes a regular monthly column, "What's Hot in Formal Epistemology?" for The Reasoner. His present research project focuses on Procedural Reasoning and Dynamic Information Structures. For more information, see his website.

Anna-Maria A. Eder is a Doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Logic and Analytical Philosophy at the University of Leuven where she works on Formal Epistemology Project led by Igor Douven. She is also a Visiting Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the research group Formal Epistemology led by Franz Huber at the University of Konstanz, Germany. Anna-Maria studied philosophy (major) and mathematics (minor) at the Universities of Salzburg, Austria, and Konstanz, Germany. She graduated in philosophy at the University of Salzburg with a MA thesis on inclusive logic in 2007. Currently she is doing a PhD in philosophy at the University of Leuven under the supervision of Igor Douven (KU Leuven) and co-supervision of Franz Huber (University of Konstanz) and James Joyce (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). Her PhD thesis is on the assessment of scientific theories linked to decision theory. In her thesis she assumes that the epistemic value of a scientific theory depends on the aspired epistemic aims, such as truth, informativeness, simplicity, coherence, unification, and explanatory power. Anna-Maria’s primary research areas are general philosophy of science, formal epistemology, and philosophical logic. For more information visit her webpage.

Pascal Engel is ordinary professor of contemporary philosophy at the University of Geneva and department chair. He is director of the research group Episteme at the University of Geneva. He has taught in Grenoble, Caen, the Sorbonne, and held a number of visiting positions. He is a member of the Institut International de philosophie and the editor of Dialectica. He has written books in French and in English on Kripke, Davidson, Truth, the philosophy of mind, th philosophy of logic, epistemology and Ramsey. His main present interests are in the epistemology of belief and in issues related to epistemic normativity. Pascal will be visiting the project for the second semester of 2010, from February until the summer.

Niki Pfeifer studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Salzburg (Austria) and at the York University (UK). He now works as a Senior Postdoc at the University of Salzburg. He is the leader of the project "Mental Probability Logic", which is financed by the Austrian Science Fund. Niki Pfeifer's research topics are located in the intersections of formal epistemology, probability logic, and the psychology of reasoning. Niki Pfeifer visited The Formal Epistemology Project in April 2010, and is visiting again from mid June to mid August.

David Atkinson is emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Groningen. Since his retirement in 2000 as a physicist, he has interested himself in theories of probability, confirmation and justification. He has also written papers on thought experiments in physics and philosophy, the status of the law of conservation of energy-momentum, and the problem of time and time-reversal in quantum mechanics. Here you can see him in the Groot Begijnhof, Leuven.

Rainer Hegselmann is professor of philosophy at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) since 1996. Before that, he was Professor at Bremen University. Currently he is director of the Philosophy & Economics degree program in Bayreuth. He obtained a PhD from the University of Essen (1976) and a habilitatiotn from the University of Karlsruhe (1983). He was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Bielefeld University).

His main interests include modelling and simulation of social dynamics (currently opinion dynamics and evolution of morals), topics in philosophy of science and social epistemology, moral philosophy, theory of argumentation, and history of the vienna circle.

David Over is a professor of psychology at Durham University. He completed a PhD in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, where Dorothy Edgington was his supervisor, but he has worked for many years in the psychology of reasoning. His recent research (with his collaborators) aims to develop the new probabilistic paradigm in the psychology of reasoning and its support for a very close connection, in people’s judgments, between the probability of a natural language conditional and the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. In further support of the new paradigm, he has most recently been studying (also with collaborators) the relation between indicative conditionals and disjunctions and also between indicative conditionals and conditional bets.

Adam Rieger is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He studied Mathematics at Cambridge and Philosophy at the London School of Economics, University College London, and Oxford, where he completed a DPhil under the supervision of Angus Macintyre and Michael Dummett. His research interests have been mainly in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophical logic, and he has recently published papers on set theory, the semantic paradoxes, Frege, and conditionals. Adam visits us at the Project from March 1 through to the end of May, 2010.

Hans Plets is Head of the Meteorological Department at Belgocontrol, the Belgian Air Navigation Service Provider. He obtained a PhD in Astronomy at the University of Leuven (1997), with a dissertation on the incidence of stars with the required characteristics for planet formation. He subsequently did postdoctoral research on the ozone layer depletion at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. He recently completed his MPhil at the University of Leuven. His main research interests include Philosophy of Science and Epistemology.