What are you going to work with at IFIKK?
I’ll be working on the philosophy of science as part of the ERC project “AssemblingLife”. It’s a philosophy of biology project investigating the significance of self-assembly and self-organization processes in understanding and explaining living systems. As a postdoc, my main role is to conduct research on the philosophical foundations of the newly emerging assembly theory approach in biophysics and explore how it connects with results of the rest of the group.
Can you tell us a bit about your research interests?
I’m a pragmatically oriented philosopher of science with a special interest in emerging forms of biological engineering – especially synthetic biology – as well as the general epistemology and methodology of science. In my doctoral research, I focused on modalities in the life sciences: by studying the actual world, how scientists can gain reliable knowledge about what is possible or necessary. Traditional philosophical approaches have sought our epistemic access to biological possibility in the DNA of natural organisms. However, with the emergence of synthetic design methods, researchers are not anymore limited by naturally evolved systems; they have even constructed alternative building blocks for life in the laboratory. In my PhD, I showed that such work can be used to develop a powerful new perspective on biological possibility in the philosophy of science.
In my postdoctoral research, I aim to conduct original research on the philosophical foundations of assembly approaches to biological systems. My research will focus especially on the newly emerging Assembly Theory (AT). AT has generated a lot of interest (including criticism) in the scientific community lately, but its philosophical foundations have yet to be properly scrutinized. The main research questions concern how AT can shed light on biological modality, and how assembly approaches to biological organization affect explanation in the life sciences. My hypothesis is that the notion of a space of assembly possibilities can highlight in a novel way how historical contingency shapes biological modality and the nature of (contrafactual) scientific explanations of biological organization.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
I’m an avid runner (just recently started getting more seriously into winter running) and a music lover (I play the guitar and collect old records); I also try to find the time to read non-academic stuff in the evenings. But most of my spare time goes into being a dad for my little daughter.