Members

Gregor Betz (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) is Professor of Philosophy of Science at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. He studies individual and collective reasoning - both in scientfic and normative domains { from an epistemological perspective. Informed by detailed logical analyses of actual debates and controversies, he develops formal models of rational argumentation which can be explored by means of computer simulations. Betz has also published on questions in philosophy of economics, philosophy of climate science, general philosophy of science, and applied ethics. For more information, please visit his website.

AnneMarie Borg (Utrecht University) is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Information and Computing Science, Utrecht University. She is an affiliated member of the Research Group for Nonmonotonic Logic and Formal Argumentation at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany) where she has recently completed her PhD. Her research is situated in the field of nonmonotonic logic and formal argumentation. One of the main ideas behind her PhD research is that defeasible reasoning - an essential characteristic of human reasoning - is best modeled from an argumentative perspective. Her published work concerns, on the one hand, theoretical investigations into logic-based argumentation and, on the other hand, an argumentative agent-based model of scientific inquiry. For more information, please visit her website.

Patrick Grim (Stony Brook University) is Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus at the Department of Philosophy at Stony Brook University and a visiting scholar at the Center for Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. He publishes widely in scholarly journals across several disciplines, including philosophy and logic, computer science, linguistics, and theoretical biology. Known for forming and working with research teams, his current research is divided between philosophical logic, ethics, and computational modeling in the dynamics of social epistemology. For more information, please visit his website.

Audrey Harnagel (Rockefeller University) is a Graduate Fellow in the field of Neuroscience (funding guaranteed through 2023) at the Rockefeller University. Her research focuses on constructing data-driven agent based models of scientific communities. She is particularly interested in building models to inform policy interventions and institutional design. She began this work as an undergraduate working with Dr. Michael Weisberg while studying Philosophy and Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. She continued this study while earning her MPhil at the University of Cambridge, where she used bibliometric information from scientific publications to build an empirically-driven model of science funding systems. Now, as a PhD student, she brings her first-hand experience from her neuroscience lab to bear in modeling scientific communities. Her ongoing projects include developing a methodology for empirically calibrating and validating highly abstracted agent based models, and interpreting model results, especially as they relate to policy interventions. For more information, please visit her website.

Stephan Hartmann (MCMP, LMU Munich) is Chair of Philosophy of Science, Alexander von Humboldt Professor, and Head of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the LMU Munich. He completed a Diploma in Physics (1991), a Master in Philosophy (1991), and a PhD degree in Philosophy (1995), each at Justus-Liebig University Giessen. Before joining LMU in 2012, he taught at Tilburg University, the London School of Economics, and the University of Konstanz. He had visiting appointments at the University of California at Irvine and Lund University and was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. He was President of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA, 2013-2017) and of the European Society for Analytical Philosophy (ESAP, 2014-2017). For more information, please visit his website.

Dominik Klein (University of Bayreuth/University of Bamberg) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the field of theoretical philosophy/formal epistemology at the University of Bayreuth and in political theory at the University of Bamberg. He works on various topics in normative political theory, epistemology and philosophy of science. In his work, he is mainly interested how the structure of social interaction impacts a variety of individual on social characteristics. In this vein he has worked on individual and social belief dynamics, the emergence of trust, expert judgment, the emergence of inequality and informational processes related to revolutionary uprisings. He has addressed these topics with agent based models, but also with logical and mathematical tools as well as classic philosophic analysis.. For more information, please visit his website.

Johannes Marx (University of Bamberg) is Chair of Political Theory at the University of Bamberg. He analyzes normative and analytical questions in Political Theory. In his work, he closely links the study of political ideas with contemporary analyses of society, employing recent tools in theory formation, such as action and decision theory, game theory, and computer simulations. He has worked on the emergence of collective belief formation, the evolution of interpersonal trust in societies, emergence and change of institutions, the quality and status of rational choice explanation, philosophy of the social sciences and economics, the value of market and democracy, and on the agency, rights and duties of animals, robots and men. For more information, please visit his website.

Christoph Merdes (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy of Science and Social Epistemology at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. He received the title Dr. Des. (Dr. phil. Pending on the publication of the dissertation) in philosophy from the LMU Munich, specifically at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. The dissertation is titled "Collective Rationality. An Agent-Based Approach". He holds a B. A. in philosophy and computer science, and an M.Sc. in computer science, both from the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. His main research interests are social epistemology, philosophy of computer simulation and normative political philosophy. These resarch interests are bound together by a methodological focus on formal reconstruction, in particular with agent-based models and simulations. He is currently employed as a 'wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter' at the Center for Applied Philosophy of Science and Key Qualifications at the FAU Erlangen Nürnberg. For more information, please visit his website.

Cailin O'Connor (UC Irvine) is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine. She is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is currently administering the NSF Grant Dynamics and Diversity in Epistemic Communities. Her book 'The Misinformation Age' is forthcoming with Yale Press, and her book 'The Origins of Unfairness' is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. For more information, please visit her website.

Soroush Rafiee Rad (University of Bayreuth) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the field of Mathematical Logic and Formal Epistemology at Bayreuth University. He is working on a project in collective attitude formation. Previously, he was a postdoc at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation at the University of Amsterdam and a research fellow at Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He completed two PhDs - in Philosophy at Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science and in Mathematics at the University of Manchester. His research lies at the intersection of mathematical logic, probabilistic reasoning and formal epistemology and can be, most coherently, characterised by the application of sophisticated mathematical and computational tools to the study of problems in epistemology, with a focus on problems in social epistemology. He has worked on the application of formal methods in investigating concepts such as rational belief formation, probabilistic models for learning conditionals, dynamics of belief change, etc. For more information, please visit his website.

Samuli Reijula (University of Tampere) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Philosophy of Science at the University of Tampere. He received his doctorate from the University of Helsinki in 2013. His current research focuses on the social epistemology of science, the epistemology of simulation modelling, and on evidence-based policy. His work has been published in various journals both in philosophy and in the social and behavioral sciences (e.g., Philosophy of Science, Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Psychology, Science & Education, Sociological Theory), as well in several edited volumes, most recently in The Routledge Handbook of Social Epistemology. His research is funded by the Academy of Finland. For more information, please visit his website.

Simon Scheller (University of Bamberg) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the field of Political Philosophy, Collective Decision Making and (the Philosophy of) Formal Modeling at the University of Bamberg. He is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of philosophy, political science and economics. He received his PhD from Bamberg University in late 2017 and started working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy until fall 2019. He studies collective decision making and other issues in political philosophy by means of agent-based modeling and other formal modeling techniques. He is also interested in the empistemology of ABMs, their methodological standards and in discovering novel areas for their application. For more information, please visit his website.

Dunja Šešelja (project initiator, TU Eindhoven/MCMP, LMU Munich) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Science and Tehcnology at TU Eindhoven and an affiliated member of MCMP, LMU Munich. She serves as an associate editor of the European Juornal for Philosophy of Science and as a member of the Steering Committee of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA). Previously, she held visiting professorships at the University of Vienna and Ghent University, and postdoctoral positions at Ghent University, Ruhr-University Bochum, and LMU Munich. Her research aims at the integration of historically informed philosophy of science and formal models of scientific inquiry. For more information, please visit her website.

Christian Straßer (Ruhr-University Bochum) is a Junior-Professor at the Institute for Philosophy II at Ruhr-University Bochum. His field of specialization is non-monotonic logic and formal argumentation. In recent publications he has applied formal methods, including agent-based models, to tackle problems in the philosophy of science. He received a Sofja Kovalevskaja award by the Humboldt foundation in 2014 and has been leading a research group on defeasible reasoning in Bochum funded by this award. For more information, please visit his website.

Kevin Zollman (Carnegie Mellon University) is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on the use of mathematical models to understand social behavior in the human and biological sciences. Trained in philosophy, he engages in interdisciplinary collaborations to answer questions about how social behavior influences learning and communication. Most relevant to the current project, his research has uncovered important relationships between social network structure and the reliability of learning in social groups. To understand these phenomena, he utilizes mathematical models and computer simulations to better understand how social structure and learning interact. For more information, please visit his website.