Workgroup

I am a professor of philosophy of mind at the Institute of Cognitive Science. My areas of specialization are the philosophy of mind (particularly free will and mental causation) and the philosophy of cognition (especially the so-called "4E" or "situated" approaches to cognition). More recently, I have also developed an interest in the philosophy of emotions and the philosophy of sex and gender.

I am a philosopher and coordinator of the Cognitive Science programs at the Institute of Cognitive Science at Osnabrück University, Germany. I mainly work on topics in the metaphysics of science and mind, and my thinking is deeply rooted in the analytic philosophical tradition. In the philosophy of mind, I am mainly interested in the debates around the mind-body problem and the thesis of physicalism, and I am curious about extravagant positions such as illusionism and panpsychism. In the philosophy of science, I am interested in frameworks for scientific explanations, especially the metaphysics of mechanisms in the new mechanist framework of explanation. I also have some interests in the philosophy of language connected to my work in the metaphysics of mind. Before becoming a philosopher, I studied information and computer engineering and worked as a researcher in the field of computational neuroscience.

I teach philosophy at the Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University (Germany). I have published on topics in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind and on the question of free will. With regard to free will, I take a libertarian position according to which we can choose between different open possibilities in our actions in many cases – even though our options may be limited by psychological or cultural factors, for example. What is important to me here is the link to relevant empirical sciences, especially psychology. In the philosophy of language, I am particularly interested in how we form language and thus our conceptions of objects with the help of metalinguistic terms and how this relates to the questions of realism, essentialism, and naturalism.

In addition, I am interested in questions of normative and applied ethics as well as metaethics. This is currently a focus of my teaching.

I’m an academic philosopher specializing in philosophy of mind and emotion and philosophy of technology as they intersect with social epistemology, social ontology, and trans and feminist philosophy. I approach philosophical research in an interdisciplinary way, including sociology and social psychology in my work. I work primarily on scripts, social interaction, emotion, injustice, transness and gender, and social media.

I’m a PhD student in cognitive science at the Institute of Cognitive Science, Osnabrück University. Before my PhD phase, I already received the bachelor and master in cognitive science from this institute's three-stage program. Now I specialize in contemporary philosophy of cognition. As a member of the working group ‘Philosophy of Mind and Cognition’, I teach philosophical and interdisciplinary classes to both bachelor and master students of our cognitive science programs. In my PhD project, I am critically reviewing the debate on extended, embedded, and bounded cognition within the (western-analytic) situated cognition paradigm. Additionally, I also work as a deputy scientific coordinator for the Research Training Group ‘Situated Cognition’, which is a DFG-funded project of Osnabrück University and Ruhr University Bochum.

Studied mathematics, philosophy, psychotherapy and psychosomatics at the universities of Mannheim and Göttingen. 1988 Doctorate in Göttingen with a thesis on Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis of meaning theory. From 1988 to 1993, research assistant in the DFG Priority Programme Cognition and Brain, followed by a DFG habilitation fellowship and a substitute position at the University of Bielefeld. 1998 Habilitation in Karlsruhe with a thesis on emergence theories in the philosophy of science, then Fellow of the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg in Delmenhorst, followed by a position as a research assistant at the Humboldt University in Berlin. From 2000 to 2001 visiting professor at the Humboldt Study Centre at the University of Ulm, 2002/2003 visiting research professor at the VU Amsterdam. From 2001 to 2023 Professor of Philosophy of Cognition at the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Osnabrück.

Main areas of research and teaching: situated human affectivity (also in social applications), philosophy of cognition and cognitive science, emergence and self-organisation, philosophy of mind, philosophy of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy research.

Research projects: From 2005 to 2013 spokesperson of the neurophilosophical research projects animal emotionale I and II, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation as part of the funding initiative ‘Key topics in the humanities’; from 2009 to 2012 co-director of the German-British research project ‘Emotional experience in depression - a philosophical study’, funded by the DFG and the AHRC; from 2017 to 2023 co-speaker of the bi-local DFG Research Training Group ‘Situated Cognition’, which has been approved until 2026.

Functions: From 2003 to 2020 Dean of Studies of the Cognitive Science degree programmes, from 2005 to 2022 member of the IKW Executive Board, from 2007 to 2009 Dean of Faculty 8, from 2017 to 2022 Speaker of the Senate of Osnabrück University, from 2017 to 2020 President of the European Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE).