About

Since October 2024, I am professor of philosophy of mind at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. Before, I was assistant professor at the department of philosophy at the University of Konstanz. Here is my contact information.

I am working at the intersection of philosophy of mind and epistemology. In particular, I am interested in the nature of mental states and attitudes in the vicinity of cognitive neutrality, e.g., agnosticism, ignorance, doxastic indecision, suspension of judgment and belief. In this context, I am also exploring how mental attitudes and activities relate to inquiry and deliberation (the “zetetic turn” in epistemology). I hold a pluralist view on cognitive neutrality, and I think that we should be clear about the nature of mental states and processes before we think of their respective normative profiles. For example, some forms of cognitive neutrality seem to be agential which has implications for their rationality.
Funded projects on neutrality: Interdisciplinary WIN-project with cognitive neuroscience, DFG-network, interdisciplinary BW-project on abstaining machine learning, BW-project on doxastic suspension.

I am also interested in the phenomena of deception (self or other) and disinformation. In particular, I study the notion of bullshitting which I analyse as giving fake answers to questions under discussion (QUDs). I try to make my philosophical work on fake answers accessible for broader audiences (see my outreach project on bullshit and fake answers).

In previous work, I was concerned with the debate on free will (or our lack thereof). In my PhD thesis, I suggested a theory of freedom of action that is compatible with determinism as well as indeterminism. After that, I worked on applications of the compatibilist free will debate to the doxastic realm (doxastic freedom and doxastic compatibilism).