Logic and Philosophy of Science Research Group

Faculty

Jeffrey Bub (PhD, London) is a Distinguished University Professor and a philosopher of physics with a special interest in the conceptual foundations of quantum theory. His book Interpreting the Quantum World (Cambridge University Press, 1997; revised paperback edition, 1999), won the prestigious Lakatos Award in 1998. His current research is focused on quantum information and computation. He was awarded the Kirwan Faculty Research and Scholarship Prize in 2005 for his work in this area.

Lindley Darden (PhD, University of Chicago) is a Distinguished Scholar/Teacher and a philosopher of science with a special interest in reasoning in the discovery of biological mechanisms. Her books include Theory Change in Science: Strategies from Mendelian Genetics (Oxford University Press, 1991) and Reasoning in Biological Discoveries: Mechanisms, Interfield Relations, and Anomaly Resolution (Cambridge University Press, 2006). Oft cited papers include her paper with Nancy Maull, "Interfield Theories" (Philosophy of Science 1977) and her paper with Peter Machamer and Carl F. Craver, "Thinking About Mechanisms" (Philosophy of Science 2000). Her next research project is in the history and philosophy of computational molecular biology.

Mathias Frisch (PhD, UC Berkeley) is an associate professor and philosopher of science. His work specializes in the philosophy of physics with a special interest in causation, the philosophy of time, and pragmatism in science. His book Inconsistency, Asymmetry, and Non-Locality: A Philosoophical Investigation of Classical Electrodynamics was published in 2005 with Oxford University Press. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the German Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation.

Jeff Horty (PhD, Pittsburgh) is a Professor in the Philosophy Department and the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS) at the University of Maryland, as well as an Affiliate Professor in the Computer Science Department. His primary interests are in philosophical logic, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science more generally; he has secondary interests in the philosophy of language, practical reasoning, and ethics. Horty is the author of three books, as well as papers on a variety of topics in logic, philosophy, and computer science; he is currently an Editor of the Journal of Philosophical Logic . His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, and by fellowships from the National Endowment for Humanities, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behaviorial Sciences at Stanford

Aidan Lyon (PhD, Australian National University) is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. His areas of philosophical research are mainly in Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Probability, Formal Epistemology and Philosophy of Mathematics. Aidan also does research in biosecurity intelligence with the Australian Centre of Excellence for Risk Analysis (ACERA) and the Australian Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF). As part of that research, he is developing a biosecurity intelligence system for aquatic animal health, called AquaticHealth.net. A similar system for plant biosecurity will also soon be launched.

Michael Morreau (PhD, Amsterdam) is an associate professor of philosophy. After studying philosophy, mathematics and computer science at the University of Amsterdam, he worked for several years in computational linguistics. In philosophy, his main interests are in using philosophical logic to explore concepts that lie at the foundation of semantics, value theory and philosophy of science.

Eric Pacuit (PhD, CUNY Graduate Center) is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy. Eric mainly works on philosophical logic (especially modal logic) and the foundations of game theory and social choice theory. He is also interested in many issues in formal epistemology. His current projects include a book (with Olivier Roy) using ideas from dynamic epistemic logic to provide epistemic foundations for various solution concepts, logical models of evidence and their dynamics, and the logical analysis of social choice procedures. Eric's research has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and a VIDI grant from the NWO (The Dutch Science Foundation).

Allen Stairs (PhD, Western Ontario) is an associate professor of philosophy whose main area of research is foundations of quantum mechanics. His publications include essays on quantum logic, on probability in quantum mechanics and on logical/structural features of entanglement.

Affiliated Faculty

James Mattingly (PhD, University of Indiana) is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. His research is primarily in philosophy of science. He spends his efforts there about equally between general issues involving conceptual change in the sciences, the epistemology of science, the nature of scientific theories, and scientific explanation on the one hand, and issues more specific to philosophy of physics on the other including quantum gravity, general relativity, black holes and singularities, gauge theories, thermodynamics, electrodynamics. He also has research interests in early modern philosophy, the foundations of logic and mathematics, and the history of logical empiricism and other movements that attempted to come to grips with the profound conceptual reorientation made necessary by the revolutionary changes in science at the turn of the 20th century.

Robert Rynasiewicz (PhD Minnesota) is a professor of philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University. He has published numerous articles in the history and philosophy of physics. I forget to send you photo and email. He recently held an NSF grant to investigate the conventionality of simultaneity. He currently holds an NSF grant to work on a collaborative project on digital scholarship in the history of quantum physics.

Graduate Students

Max Bialek is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. He earned his BA with honors in Philosophy at Rutgers University - New Brunswick in 2008. Max was moonlighting as a neuroscientist for two years before joining Maryland in 2010, doing electrophysiology in active rats with Carlos Brody's lab at Princeton University. He is currently interested in the variety of uses and interpretations of entropy, and trying to understand what underwrites the variance in people's ability to perform tasks involving statistical reasoning.

Lane DesAutels is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Before coming to Maryland, Lane received an MA in philosophy from Western Michigan University and a BA from the University of Puget Sound with a major in philosophy. Lane’s primary research interests are in scientific explanation, metaphysics of science, and mechanisms.

Lucas Dunlap is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland. He earned his BA with honors in Philosophy at Trinity College, Connecticut, and his MA in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics from Columbia University. His main area of interest is the philosophy of quantum mechanics, particularly the area of quantum information. He also has interests in general questions in the philosophy of science, and in the philosophy of technology.

Deepak Mirchandani is a 2nd-year PhD student in Philosophy. He is also affiliated with the IGERT program at UMD, in Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity. His interests center around natural-language semantics & pragmatics, in particular presupposition & implicature. He is currently exploring applications of dynamic logic and category theory (especially topos theory) to language. He holds a BA from The College of Wooster and an MA from the University of Houston, both in Philosophy.

Brendan Ritchie is a PH.D student in the philosophy program at UMD. He joined the program in 2007 (completing an M.A. in the program in 2010), after a B.A. (honors) in philosophy (2005) at the University of Manitoba, in Winnipeg, Canada. Since 2008, he has been a graduate student researcher in Thomas Carlson's Maryland Vision Science Lab at UMD (www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/mvsl/), where he does experimental work on body perception. He is also a member of PHLING (phling.umd.edu), a research group consisting of philosophy and linguistic graduate students. Brendan's dissertation is on the (theoretical and methodological) foundations of cognitive science—in particular, on how one might go about explicitly relating and unifying psychological and neuroscientific explanations.

Christian Tarsney is a first-year PhD student in philosophy at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his BA in philosophy from the University of Minnesota. His primary area of interest is the philosophy of time, in particular the sources of the asymmetry and directionality of time in general relativity, quantum mechanics, and thermodynamics, and the interactions between the physics of time and questions of personal identity across time.

Sungwon Woo is a PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received a BA and an MA from the Seoul National University, in aesthetics. His current research interests are rational choice problem and its wide applications, including social choice, statistical model choice, and system choice in metaphysics.

Research Associates

Florin Moldoveanu (PhD, UMCP) is a Research Associate with a special interest in solving Hilbert’s sixth problem asking for physics axiomatization. To avoid the consequences of Gödel incompleteness theorem Moldoveanu is investigating an axiomatization using principle and Bourbaki approaches. Moldoveanu also is focusing on the foundations of quantum theory and on using C* algebras over complex quaternions which support structural unification of quantum mechanics and theory of relativity.