Ludwig Maximilians Universität, München
Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Study of Religion
PhD, 2012
Southampton, United Kingdom
  •  38
    Philosophy of Science: Between the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities (edited book)
    with Antonio Piccolomini D’Aragona, Martin Carrier, Roger Deulofeu, Axel Gelfert, Jens Harbecke, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Lara Huber, Peter Hucklenbroich, Ludger Jansen, Elizaveta Kostrova, Keizo Matsubara, Andrea Reichenberger, Kian Salimkhani, and Javier Suárez
    Springer Verlag. 2018.
    This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling. Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian…Read more
  •  5
    Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especia…Read more
  •  16
    Life has evolved; and so must have consciousness, or subjective experience, as found in living beings, Eva Jablonka and Simona Ginsburg contend. In their target article, which summarises the main theses of their seminal book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul, the authors put forward an evolutionary account of consciousness that builds upon the intimate connection between consciousness and life without, however, equating the two. Instead, according to Jablonka & Ginsburg, there was life before …Read more
  •  10
    Analytic metaphysics has recently discovered biology as a means of grounding metaphysical theories. This has resulted in long-standing metaphysical puzzles, such as the problems of personal identity and material constitution, being increasingly addressed by appeal to a biological understanding of identity. This development within metaphysics is in significant tension with the growing tendency amongst philosophers of biology to regard biological identity as a deep puzzle in its own right, especia…Read more
  •  7
    Chauncey Maher's Plant Minds (review)
    BJPS Review of Books. 2019.
  •  57
    One or two? A Process View of pregnancy
    Philosophical Studies 179 (5): 1495-1521. 2022.
    How many individuals are present where we see a pregnant individual? Within a substance ontological framework, there are exactly two possible answers to this question. The standard answer—two individuals—is typically championed by scholars endorsing the predominant Containment View of pregnancy, according to which the foetus resides in the gestating organism like in a container. The alternative answer—one individual—has recently found support in the Parthood View, according to which the foetus i…Read more
  •  16
    Bio-Agency and the Possibility of Artificial Agents
    In Antonio Piccolomini D’Aragona, Martin Carrier, Roger Deulofeu, Axel Gelfert, Jens Harbecke, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Lara Huber, Peter Hucklenbroich, Ludger Jansen, Elizaveta Kostrova, Keizo Matsubara, Anne Sophie Meincke, Andrea Reichenberger, Kian Salimkhani & Javier Suárez (eds.), Philosophy of Science: Between the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities, Springer Verlag. pp. 65-93. 2018.
    Within the philosophy of biology, recently promising steps have been made towards a biologically grounded concept of agency. Agency is described as bio-agency: the intrinsically normative adaptive behaviour of human and non-human organisms, arising from their biological autonomy. My paper assesses the bio-agency approach by examining criticism recently directed by its proponents against the project of embodied robotics. Defenders of the bio-agency approach have claimed that embodied robots do no…Read more
  •  40
    Autopoiesis, biological autonomy and the process view of life
    European Journal for Philosophy of Science 9 (1): 1-16. 2018.
    In recent years, an increasing number of theoretical biologists and philosophers of biology have been opposing reductionist research agendas by appealing to the concept of biological autonomy which draws on the older concept of autopoiesis. In my paper, I investigate some of the ontological implications of this approach. The emphasis on autonomy and autopoiesis, together with the associated idea of organisational closure, might evoke the impression that organisms are to be categorised ontologica…Read more
  • Michael Quante, Person (Grundthemen Philosophie) (review)
    Philosophisches Jahrbuch 116 221-225. 2009.
  •  34
    According to dispositional realism, or dispositionalism, the entities inhabiting our world possess irreducibly dispositional properties – often called ‘powers’ – by means of which they are sources of change. Dispositionalism has become increasingly popular among metaphysicians in the last three decades as it offers a realist account of causation and provides novel avenues for understanding modality, laws of nature, agency, free will and other key concepts in metaphysics. At the same time, it is …Read more
  • According to dispositional realism, or dispositionalism, the entities inhabiting our world possess irreducibly dispositional properties – often called ‘powers’ – by means of which they are sources of change. Dispositionalism has become increasingly popular among metaphysicians in the last three decades as it offers a realist account of causation and provides novel avenues for understanding modality, laws of nature, agency, free will and other key concepts in metaphysics. At the same time, dispos…Read more
  •  2
    Stephen Mumford has argued that dispositionalists ought to be endurantists because perdurantism, by breaking down persisting objects in sequences of static discrete existents, is at odds with a powers metaphysics. This has been contested by Neil Williams who offers his own version of ‘powerful’ perdurance where powers function as links between the temporal parts of persisting objects. Weighing up the arguments given by both sides, I show that the profile of ‘powerful’ persistence crucially depen…Read more
  • Substanz, Relation oder beides: Augustinus und Heidegger zur Frage ‘Was sind Personen?’ (Substance, Relation or Both: Augustine and Heidegger on the Question ‘What are Persons?’)
    Crossing Borders. Grenzen (Über)Denken. Beiträge Zum 9. Internationalen Kongress der Österreichischen Gesellschaft Für Philosophie in Wien. 2012.
    What are persons? There are two traditional answers: the relation model of person according to which a person is nothing more than a function of her relationships to other persons and the substance model which construes the person as persisting independently of relations and accidental properties. In my paper, I explore two interesting intersections of these models occurring in Augustine's speculative doctrine of trinity and in Heidegger’s early Theory of Dasein. Are Augustine’s and Heidegger’s …Read more
  • What is metaphysics? And what do we need it for? In this paper I argue that if we answer the first question appropriately, the second question becomes pointless. To understand what metaphysics is means to understand what it is for. I shall propose that metaphysics, as a philosophical discipline, is the addressing of reality with respect to the intelligibility of reality as a whole and, i.e., the addressing of reality's being-addressed in various contexts (everyday and scientific). Insofar as rea…Read more
  •  1
    Haben menschliche Embryonen eine Disposition zur Personalität?
    In Markus Rothhaar, Martin Hähnel & Roland Kipke (eds.), Der manipulierbare Embryo, Brill Mentis. pp. 147-171. 2018.
    Do human embryos have a disposition to personhood? This has been argued within recent attempts to reformulate the classical argument from potentiality for the protection of human embryos with the help of the concept of disposition. In this paper, I analyse the central ontological premise of this new approach and show that any hopes of rehabilitating in dispositionalist terms the idea of a potential to personhood inherent in human embryos are mistaken. The dispositionalist version of the potentia…Read more
  •  1
    Human Persons – A Process View
    In Jörg Ulrich Noller (ed.), Was sind und wie existieren Personen?. pp. 53-76. forthcoming.
    What are persons and how do they exist? The predominant answer to this question in Western metaphysics is that persons, human and others, are, and exist as, substances, i.e., ontologically independent, well-demarcated things defined by an immutable (usually mental) essence. Change, on this view, is not essential for a person's identity; it is in fact more likely to be detrimental to it. In this chapter I want to suggest an alternative view of human persons which is motivated by an appreciation o…Read more
  • Adorno und Descartes, programmatisch versöhnt: Der wissenschaftliche Essay als Form
    Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift Für Europäisches Denken 63 (11): 1077-1081. 2009.
    In his famous essay „Der Essay als Form“ („The Essay as Form"), Adorno accuses Descartes of committing science to the ideal of absolute certainty (“zweifelsfreie Gewissheit”), thereby preluding the modern organized science (“organisierte Wissenschaft”), which in Adorno’s view has become alienated from real intellectual experience (“geistige Erfahrung”). In my essay, I criticize Adorno’s critique, showing that what Descartes in fact thinks about task and method of science comes much closer to the…Read more
  • Can mental causation be naturalised without being eliminated? Thomas Buchheim argues that it can, proposing a neo-Aristotelian account dubbed "Horizontal Dualism". In this paper I assess this proposal. This article is part of a series of articles commenting on Thomas Buchheim's target article "Neuronenfeuer und seelische Tat. Ein neoaristotelischer Vorschlag zum Verständnis mentaler Kausalität", published in Philosophisches Jahrbuch 119,2 (2012), 332-346. The article was reprinted in: Mentale Ve…Read more
  • Eric Olson distinguishes his animalistic account of transtemporal personal identity from the apparently similar Bodily Criterion, among other things, by accusing the latter of being contaminated with Cartesian implications owing to its usage of the term ‚body‘. In contrast, Olson argues, Animalism is able to avoid these implications by substituting the concept of body for the concept of organism, which makes Animalism not only a distinct position, but also the better alternative to the Bodily Cr…Read more
  •  1
    In destructing traditional metaphysics, Heidegger accuses German Idealism of eliminating the finite in favour of the infinite. Particularly Hegel is criticized for ignoring the true finitude of Dasein and thereby misinterpreting being as infinite absolute. The paper explores this criticism in three steps. First, the main features of Heidegger’s early metaphysics of finite Dasein as developed in Being and Time will be traced, followed, second, by an examination of Heidegger’s claim that Hegel’s a…Read more
  •  3
    The argument from potentiality for embryo protection relies on the assumption of a specific developmental potential of human embryos: as human embryos under normal conditions naturally developing into beings whose strong moral status is uncontroversial, namely into human persons, they likewise enjoy strong moral status. In my paper, I endeavour to spell out the ontological foundations of the argument from potentiality and to discuss them critically in the light of new empirical findings in embry…Read more
  •  1
    Within the philosophy of biology, recently promising steps have been made towards a biologically grounded concept of agency. Agency is described as bio-agency: the intrinsically normative adaptive behaviour of human and non-human organisms, arising from their biological autonomy. My paper assesses the bio-agency approach by examining criticism recently directed by its proponents against the project of embodied robotics. Defenders of the bio-agency approach have claimed that embodied robots do no…Read more
  •  5
    Human persons exist longer than a single moment in time; they persist through time. However, so far it has not been possible to make this natural and widespread assumption metaphysically comprehensible. The philosophical debate on personal identity is rather stuck in a dilemma: reductionist theories explain personal identity away, while non-reductionist theories fail to give any informative account at all. This chapter argues that this dilemma emerges from an underlying commitment, shared by bot…Read more
  •  6
    Recent decades have seen an increasing tendency to exclude the phenomenon of personality from the metaphysical investigation of personal identity. We are advised not to confuse personal identity as a philosophical subject, namely as the metaphysical issue of specifying what it is that makes a person staying numerically self-identical over time, with the psychological question of 'personal identity' which asks what makes someone the individual person they are with their particular character and h…Read more
  •  136
    The Disappearance of Change: Towards a Process Account of Persistence
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 27 (1): 12-30. 2019.
    This paper aims to motivate a new beginning in metaphysical thinking about persistence by drawing attention to the disappearance of change in current accounts of persistence. I defend the claim that the debate is stuck in a dilemma which results from neglecting the constructive role of change for persistence. Neither of the two main competing views, perdurantism and endurantism, captures the idea of persistence as an identity through time. I identify the fundamental ontological reasons for this,…Read more