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.