Hans Halvorson is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, working on the philosophy of physics, logic, and the foundations of mathematics. His research uses category theory and formal methods to analyze theoretical equivalence and intertheoretic reduction, and engages with Quinean ontological commitment and Carnapian approaches to theory choice. It spans quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the philosophy of language.
A central preoccupation is Bohr's unfinished project: the construction of a worldview adequate to atomic physics. That project was largely abandoned after 1945 when physics became utility-driven — a loss, …
Hans Halvorson is Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, working on the philosophy of physics, logic, and the foundations of mathematics. His research uses category theory and formal methods to analyze theoretical equivalence and intertheoretic reduction, and engages with Quinean ontological commitment and Carnapian approaches to theory choice. It spans quantum mechanics, general relativity, and the philosophy of language.
A central preoccupation is Bohr's unfinished project: the construction of a worldview adequate to atomic physics. That project was largely abandoned after 1945 when physics became utility-driven — a loss, not a resolution. Recovering it means excavating the Danish intellectual tradition that shaped Bohr, tracing a line of thought from Møller through Kierkegaard to Høffding and then to Bohr's "epistemological lesson of quantum physics." This work, undertaken in collaboration with historian of science Anja Skaar Jacobsen, takes the history seriously as a way of finding one's bearings at a philosophical frontier that remains open.
