Lecturers

Helen Beebee is Samuel Hall Professor of Philosophy at the University of Manchester. Her research falls mostly under the broad theme of 'Humeanism', which she takes to be the view that there is no such thing as natural necessity (or, if there is, it is a fairly superficial rather than a fundamental feature of reality). She has also written on Hume himself, on freedom of the will, and in particular on defending compatibilism. Helen has an interest in the under-representation of women in philosophy. Together with Jennifer Saul (University of Sheffield), she wrote a report on the situation of women in philosophy in the UK on behalf of the British Philosophical Association and the Society for Women in Philosophy (UK) in 2011; women make up about 25% of permanent academic staff in the UK. Helen also has a paper, 'Women and Deviance in Philosophy', in a collection edited by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins (Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change?, OUP 2013). For more information, visit her website. 

Rachael Briggs earned her PhD in philosophy in 2009, and now works at the Australian National University and Griffith University in decision theory, metaphysics, and formal epistemology. She is currently working on two Discovery Projects. Wellbeing, Preferences, and Basic Goods is a book-length project defending desire-satisfaction theories of wellbeing. Decision Theory in Crisis, held jointly with Daniel Nolan and Alan Hájek, is a general investigation into the foundations of causal decision theory. Her other research interests include truthmaking, judgment aggregation, the logic of counterfactuals, and the metaphysics of chance. Her tutorials will cover basic concepts of decision theory (such as probability, expected utility, and the role of preferences), and discuss their applications to causation, hypothesis testing, and the assessment of risk. For more information, visit her website.

Sebastian Lutz has received his diploma in theoretical physics from the University of Hamburg, was a visiting student fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science on a Fulbright scholarship and a graduate student in the Philosophy department at the University of Western Ontario. Sebastian has been a PhD researcher under Thomas Müller, Janneke van Lith, and Albert Visser in the Theoretical Philosophy Unit at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, and received his PhD in 2012. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the MCMP. In his works, he focuses on philosophical methodology, foundations of philosophy of science, empirical significance, intertheoretical relations, the history of logical empiricism, and formal methods in ethics. For more information, visit his website.

Conor Mayo-Wilson is an Assistant Professor at the the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. He earned his PhD and masters degrees from from Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie primarily in philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mathematics, and logic. He also has strong interests in analytic philosophy, decision theory, game theory, and ancient philosophy. Much of his research, however, has focused on causal inference and on the use of models (and computer simulations) to investigate how scientific communities might be arranged so as to hasten discovery. Currently, Conor is investigating questions on the role of modeling in philosophy together with Stephan Hartmann. For more information, visit his website.

Gil Sagi completed her BSc degree in mathematics and philosophy as well as her MA and PhD degree in Philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. In the fall of 2013, she joined MCMP as a postdoctoral research fellow. Gil’s research interests are in the philosophy of logic (logical consequence formality, logical terms), philosophy of language (the analytic/synthetic distinction), philosophy of mathematics (optimism in mathematics) and history of the philosophy of logic (Frege, Tarski, Carnap). Gil Sagi has received various awards as a Bachelor, Master student, and PhD student of Hebrew University. In 2013, she was rewarded Yael Cohen Memorial Prize for Excellency in Philosophical Research for her PhD thesis. For more information, visit her website.

Sonja Smets is an associate professor at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) at the University of Amsterdam. Before her appointment at the ILLC, she held academic positions in Brussels and in Groningen. At the University of Groningen she held a Rosalind Franklin Research Fellowship from 2009 till 2012 in affiliation to both the Faculty of Philosophy and the Faculty of Mathematics & Natural Sciences. Her research programme ranges over Logic (in particular non-classical logics, including non-monotonic logics, belief revision, modal and temporal logic, quantum logic); Multi-agent Systems; Formal Epistemology; Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Quantum Physics, Quantum Information and Computation. For more information, visit her website.

Florian Steinberger was educated at the University of Paris I, Panthéon-Sorbonne where he took a Maîtrise in philosophy and in mathematical logic. He then crossed the Channel to pursue graduate work at the University of Cambridge where he took an MPhil and a PhD. From 2008 to 2011, he held a Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge, where he was also Director of Studies in philosophy. In April 2011, Florian took up his current position as Assistant Professor in Logic and Philosophy of Language. In Spring 2012, he was Visiting Scholar at the Department of Philosophy and Patrick Suppes Center for History and Philosophy of Science, Stanford University. For more information, visit his website.