Research Associates

Jan Heylen is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Logic and Analytic Philosophy at the University of Leuven. He obtained his MPhil and PhD degrees in Leuven. His research is centered around philosophical logic, i.e. applications of mathematical logic to philosophical problems. Some of the topics he has worked on are: slingshot and collapse arguments for intensional logics, the logical form of descriptions and conditionals, and the knowability of arithmetical truths.

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.

Sara Verbrugge is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leuven. Her research is funded by the Fund for Scientific Research – Flanders. She obtained a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Leuven in 2007 with a dissertation on Conditionals, supervised by William Van Belle (Leuven, Linguistics) and Walter Schaeken (Leuven, Experimental psychology). Her main research interests are: experimental pragmatics, language acquisition, psycholinguistics and reasoning research.

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.

Martin Fischer is a researcher at the University of Leuven in the project Antirealist Truth. He did his Master and PhD in 2007 in Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. His PhD investigated the compatibility of a Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics and a deflationary theory of truth and was published in 2008. His main interests are theories of truth, especially axiomatic accounts of deflationary and antirealist theories. He is currently working on interpretability relations of conservative theories of truth.

Richard Dietz is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Odysseus Research Group in Formal Epistemology at the University of Leuven and an Associate Fellow of the Arché Research Centre at the University of St Andrews (Scotland). He obtained his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2005, with a thesis on the semantics and epistemology of vague languages. He held research positions in the Arché Research Centre and the Institute for Philosophical Research in Mexico City. His primary interests are in philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophical logic.

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.

Jake Chandler received a PhD in Philosophy from King's College London in December 2005, with a thesis on evolutionary approaches to epistemology and philosophy of mind (supervisors: David Papineau and James Hopkins). He has since held positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Glasgow. His research interests span topics in formal epistemology and philosophy of biology. He is currently working on higher-order probabilities, acceptance conditions for conditionals, and points of contact between the Bayesian and "belief revision" traditions.