Lecturers

Dunja Šešelja is Professor for Social Epistemology and Reasoning in Science at the Institute for Philosophy II, Ruhr University Bochum, and a member of the Philosophy & Ethics Group, TU Eindhoven. Previously, she held visiting professorships at the University of Vienna and Ghent University, and postdoctoral positions at Ghent University, Ruhr-University Bochum, and MCMP, LMU Munich. Her research focuses on social epistemology of science and at the integration of historically informed philosophy of science and formal models of scientific inquiry.

Lecture stream: Social Epistemology of Scientific Disagreements

Scientific disagreements are an important catalyst for scientific progress. However, unless handled with care, they can result in scientific polarization, fragmentation of the domain, ambiguity for policy-makers, and the loss of public trust in science. How, then, should scientists handle disagreements? This question concerns not only how individual scientists should rationally respond to disagreements with their peers, but also how such responses impact collective inquiry. In this course, we will look into central issues discussed in the Social Epistemology of Scientific Disagreement: from informal discussions on peer-disagreement and epistemic tolerance to computational approaches based on agent-based modeling. Throughout the course, we will discuss various examples of scientific disagreements in both standard research contexts and the high-stakes context of "fast science".

Xueyin (Snow) Zhang is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Logic Group at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley, she served as a Bersoff Faculty Fellow at New York University, facilitating courses on topics like the philosophy of science and epistemology. Her primary research interests lie in formal epistemology, philosophy of probability and decision theory. She is also interested in Chinese philosophy. Her current research concerns rational belief revision, judgment aggregation and logic of conditionals.

Lecture stream: Philosophy of Decision Theory

We make decisions all the time—what to have for breakfast, how to go to school, where to go for vacations, whether to pursue a PhD in philosophy. But how should we make decisions? And why? This is an introductory course to the philosophical foundations of decision theory. The topics we will discuss include: rational choice theory, axiomatic representations of expected utility theory, decision theories that accommodate aversion to risk and/or ambiguity, causal vs. evidential decision theory and decision theory for agents with limited cognitive resources.

Sabina Leonelli holds the Chair of Philosophy and History of Science and Technology at the Technical University of Munich. Until 2024, Leonelli was the Director of the Exeter Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences at the University of Exeter, where she continues to hold an Honorary Professorship. Leonelli’s research, which includes philosophical, historical and social science methods, concerns (i.) the role of technology and data in knowledge production and (ii.) the institutionalization of Open Science as a window on the methods, epistemology and political economy of contemporary forms of scientific inquiry.

Evening Lecture

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the chasm between the conditions of policy-making in democratic societies and the content of scientific claims about the state of the world and its wicked problems has grown into a stalemate. On the one hand, policy-makers are accountable to a fractured society with increasing stratification and inequities, coupled with growing mistrust in established authorities and sources of knowledge, confusion linked to rapid technological change, exposure to vast misinformation campaigns, and a preference for interventions that may visibly improve social conditions in the short term. On the other hand, scientific research on biodiversity, climate change, public health and wealth distribution is yielding such a dire evaluation of the prospects of life on the planet as to make policy seem almost irrelevant, especially given the long-term, systematic nature of interventions required for positive change and the widespread perception of environmental action as increasing - rather than reducing - social disparities. By reflecting on recent efforts to propose a novel framework for the role of scientific evidence and related technologies in policy-making, which I call ‘environmental intelligence’ (EI), I argue that philosophy of science can help public policy to find a way out of this conundrum. After describing the ways in which EI can support effective interpretation and use of scientific evidence for policy interventions, I reflect on three forms of communication which I found most effective in engaging policy-makers in the European Commission, transnational organisations (e.g. the United Nations), and regional government: (1) policy reports; (2) policy workshops; and (3) engagement with key constituencies, e.g. local government, NGOs, civic associations public authorities. I conclude by discussing the ways in which such engagement in turns informs the methods and content of philosophical scholarship, focusing on the public significance of philosophy findings and the impact of transdisciplinary debate on philosophical arguments.