Project Staff

Janneke Huitink is a postdoctoral researcher in theoretical philosophy at the University of Groningen. In 2008, she obtained her PhD in Philosophy from the Radboud University Nijmegen, with a thesis on the compositional interaction between modal expressions and conditionals. Since then, she joined the institute for linguistics at the Goethe-University Frankfurt, where she got interested in the psychology of reasoning. Together with David Over and Shira Elqayam, she worked in the EURO XPRAG project "Iterated conditionals. As ordinary as can be?". Her current objective is to experimentally investigate philosophical claims about the interpretation of conditionals.

Jan-Willem Romeijn is an assistant professor at the Philosophy Faculty of the University of Groningen. He obtained degrees cum laude in both physics and philosophy, worked as a financial mathematician, won an individual PhD-grant from NWO in 2000, and received his doctorate cum laude from the University of Groningen in 2005. Before he received a postdoc grant in 2007, he lectured statistics and philosophy of science at the Psychology Department of the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include scientific method, the foundations of statistics, inductive logic, and causal modelling.

Allard Tamminga is lecturer in theoretical philosophy at the University of Groningen. He obtained his Ph.D. in 2001 from the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation of the University of Amsterdam. Later on, he was lecturer in artificial intelligence at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since 2003 he works in Groningen. He worked on logics of belief revision and their embedding in pragmatist epistemology, on paraconsistent logics, on the history of twentieth-century philosophy of mind, and on multi-agent deontic logic.

Katrin Pfeifer is doing her second PhD under Igor Douven. She studied history, pedagogic, and English at the Universities of Salzburg and Vienna. Katrin Pfeifer is supported by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (DOC-Grant) since 2009. Presently she is finishing her first PhD in history on the cultural history of severe storms at the Universities of Salzburg and Vienna. Areas of competence include the cultural history of natural disasters in general; perception, interpretation, management, and memory of natural disasters in Early Modern Times. Katrin Pfeifer visited The Formal Epistemology Project in April 2010, and visited again from mid June to mid August.

David Atkinson is emeritus professor of theoretical physics at the University of Groningen. Since his retirement in 2000 as a physicist, he has interested himself in theories of probability, confirmation and justification. He has also written papers on thought experiments in physics and philosophy, the status of the law of conservation of energy-momentum, and the problem of time and time-reversal in quantum mechanics. Here you can see him in the Groot Begijnhof, Leuven.

Inge de Wilde studied French linguistics and literature at the University of Amsterdam. Later she specialized in Dutch social history of the 19th century. In 1998 she defended her thesis Nieuwe deelgenoten in de wetenschap. Vrouwelijke studenten en docenten aan de Rijksuniversiteit Groningen 1871-1919 (Assen 1998) (New participants in science. Female students and professors at the University of Groningen 1871-1919). Inge de Wilde wrote several books on academic life in Groningen and published letters from Aletta H. Jacobs (1854-1929), the first woman who entered university (in 1871) in the Netherlands. Recently there appeared her publication on the private library of C.V. Gerritsen (1850-1905), alderman of Amsterdam, member of parliament and husband of Aletta Jacobs. Inge de Wilde worked at the University of Groningen as head of the Studium Generale and organizer of cultural events. She is member of the board of the quarterly Biografie Bulletin and of the editorial board of Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon (digital biographical dictionary of Dutch women).

Rainer Hegselmann is professor of philosophy at the University of Bayreuth (Germany) since 1996. Before that, he was Professor at Bremen University. Currently he is director of the Philosophy & Economics degree program in Bayreuth. He obtained a PhD from the University of Essen (1976) and a habilitatiotn from the University of Karlsruhe (1983). He was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS) and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (Bielefeld University).

His main interests include modelling and simulation of social dynamics (currently opinion dynamics and evolution of morals), topics in philosophy of science and social epistemology, moral philosophy, theory of argumentation, and history of the vienna circle.

David Over is a professor of psychology at Durham University. He completed a PhD in philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, where Dorothy Edgington was his supervisor, but he has worked for many years in the psychology of reasoning. His recent research (with his collaborators) aims to develop the new probabilistic paradigm in the psychology of reasoning and its support for a very close connection, in people’s judgments, between the probability of a natural language conditional and the conditional probability of the consequent given the antecedent. In further support of the new paradigm, he has most recently been studying (also with collaborators) the relation between indicative conditionals and disjunctions and also between indicative conditionals and conditional bets.

Adam Rieger is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. He studied Mathematics at Cambridge and Philosophy at the London School of Economics, University College London, and Oxford, where he completed a DPhil under the supervision of Angus Macintyre and Michael Dummett. His research interests have been mainly in the philosophy of mathematics and philosophical logic, and he has recently published papers on set theory, the semantic paradoxes, Frege, and conditionals. Adam visits us at the Project from March 1 through to the end of May, 2010.

Katya Tentori graduated in Experimental Psychology at the University of Padua (Italy), received a PhD in Research Methods in Psychology from University of Genoa (Italy), was a Marie Curie fellow at UCL (UK), and is now a professor at University of Trento (Italy). Her current research interests include inductive reasoning (e.g., the assessment of the relative normative/descriptive adequacy of competing Bayesian models of confirmation) as well as medical decision making (e.g., the identification of appropriate procedures to elicit decision weights in medical settings and to improve communication between doctors and patients).

Helen De Cruz is postdoctoral fellow in the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Leuven. She obtained her PhD  on naturalistic approaches in the philosophy of mathematics at the Free University Brussel in 2007. Her main interests include philosophy of mind, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology and philosophy of science. Most of her published work deals with the relationship between intuitive modes of reasoning, cognitive biases and formalized modes of reasoning, including mathematics and science. Her current research examines how intuitive probability assessments play a role in scientific understanding.

Martin Fischer is a researcher at the University of Leuven in the project Antirealist Truth. He did his Master and PhD in 2007 in Munich at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität. His PhD investigated the compatibility of a Davidsonian truth-theoretic semantics and a deflationary theory of truth and was published in 2008. His main interests are theories of truth, especially axiomatic accounts of deflationary and antirealist theories. He is currently working on interpretability relations of conservative theories of truth.

Christoph Kelp joined the Formal Epistemology Project as a postdoctoral research fellow in July 2008. He completed his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Free University Berlin and University of Leuven and his master’s degree also in philosophy at the Universities of St. Andrews and Stirling. In 2007 he obtained his Ph.D. for a thesis entitled A Minimalist Approach to Epistemology under the supervision of Duncan Pritchard from the University of Stirling. Kelp’s research focuses mainly on epistemology and he has published a number of papers in this field and in related areas. In the second semester of the academic year 2008/2009 he will be teaching W0EA3A—Theory of Knowledge to bachelor’s students of the international programme at University of Leuven. For more information, visit his website.

Hans Plets is Head of the Meteorological Department at Belgocontrol, the Belgian Air Navigation Service Provider. He obtained a PhD in Astronomy at the University of Leuven (1997), with a dissertation on the incidence of stars with the required characteristics for planet formation. He subsequently did postdoctoral research on the ozone layer depletion at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. He recently completed his MPhil at the University of Leuven. His main research interests include Philosophy of Science and Epistemology.