Are you a PhD student or Post Doc at the University of Oslo doing research on Mind, Rationality, Action or other CSMN-related matters? If so, you may be able to benefit more directly from CSMN's unique research environment by joining our Affiliate Program. To learn more about the program's benefits and find out how to apply for status as a CSMN Affiliate, click here
CSMN Affiliates
Trine Antonsen
Trine Antonsen is a Ph.D. Fellow in philosophy at Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, University of Oslo (from February 2010).
Trine works in the area of philosophy of language and her
project intersects with linguistics and cognitive science. In her
thesis Trine wants to critically examine the explanatory benefits
of truth conditional semantics as a way of representing and
understanding the linguistically encoded meaning of sentences, and
her hypothesis is that for pragmatic theories of communication an
alternative view where meaning is understood and represented as
instructions for concept construction works better for their
explanatory purposes.
Trine has a BA in Gender Studies and a MA in Philosophy from the
University of Oslo. She has had research visits at Birkbeck College
at the University of London, and at Rutgers Center for Cognitive
Science at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Her interests also
include feminism and food ethics, as well as philosophy of
mind.
Email: trineant@ifikk.uio.no
Guro Fløgstad
Guro Fløgstad is a Ph.D. fellow in linguistics at the Institute for Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Oslo, from where she has her MA (2007). She has been affiliated with the CSMN since August 2009. Guro is interested in how grammatical structure arises and changes, and researches the process by which lexical items become part of a language’s grammar. She is particularly interested in the way aspectual categories develop, and her Ph.D. project treats the loss and possible reappearance of the perfect category in a Spanish variety spoken in parts of Argentina and Uruguay. Theoretically, she tries to remain open, though she mainly works within the cognitive grammaticalization framework, which she combines with insights from diachronic semantics, pragmatics and psycholinguistics. Guro likes to collect data for her projects herself, and has done extensive fieldwork in the Río de la Plata region in Argentina and Uruguay, in the Bangan province in The Indian Himalayas, and in Romani-speaking communities in Southern Norway and Sweden.
Jorid Moen
Jorid Moen is a PhD fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas (starting January 2009). She is educated in medicine (MD) and philosophy (MA/"hovedfag"), and has diverse experience as a physician. She is a member of Regional Committee for Medical and Health Research Ethics (2005-2009).
Jorid's PhD project is trans-disciplinary and called "The Perspectives of Psychiatry; a Pragmatist Approach". Claiming that the traditional discussion of meta-psychiatric problems (at least in some cases) is limited because of being articulated in a dichotomised way (embedded in ontological terms), her aim is to explore whether a contemporary pragmatist approach may create a more flexible space for meta-psychiatric discussion. The pragmatist approach regards ontological commitments as commitments to certain vocabularies (ways of talking about the world). The mental is looked upon as normatively based, and the traditional understanding of the brain-mind dichotomy as contingent. This opens for a dynamic conception of the mental which clears the ground for questioning both the hierarchical world view that legitimates the authority of natural science and the dualistic understanding of the mental. As the different perspectives (explanations and understandings) of psychiatry will be treated as vocabularies, and as such as tools, the primary question will be: In which ways are the perspectives useful, and by virtue of what are they useful? For this to be meaningfully answered the specific values (purposes, needs and interests) of the users of the perspective have to be specified. The consequence of this for psychiatric theory and practice, is that different perspectives can be compared in terms of the different values and interests that each brings into view. As evaluation of the different perspectives will focus on their usefulness related to certain values, more perspectives may be relevant and justified both as part of the theoretical framework and as implemented at the same time for one particular patient.
E-mail: jorid.moen@ifikk.uio.no
Kim Angell
Kim Angell is a PhD Fellow at the Ethics Programme. He works in the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo, and has been a CSMN Affiliate since April 2009.
Kim’s research interests lie predominantly in normative ethics and political philosophy, and his PhD project explores whether there is a moral claim-right to secede from well-functioning liberal democracies. A main research question is whether Lockean arguments for the generation of special (non-fundamental) property rights to external resources can ground legitimate territorial claims. He is particularly interested in how labor and value-creation may establish a (pro tanto) right to territory. More generally, his project will explore how Lockean value-creation arguments can be included in a more extensive theory of secession and territorial rights.
E-mail: kim.angell@stv.uio.no
Frank Barel
Frank Barel is a Ph.D fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts and Ideas. His research interests are mainly in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language.
In his Ph.D. project, Frank investigates issues revolving around a fundamental problem in the philosophy of mind. Namely, how immediate, non-inferential self-knowledge is so much as possible given that the contents of our thoughts and beliefs depend on factors that are external to our minds – that is, on the physical and social environment in which we find ourselves.Ultimately, Frank aims to defend the position that, although content externalism does indeed limit one’s first-person authority in various ways, the phenomenon of self-knowledge can nevertheless be given a substantial epistemology which involves a cognitive achievement on part of the person in question. That is to say, according to the position Frank defends there is in fact a true causal-explanatory-cum-justificatory story to be told of how self-ascriptive judgments are apt to be knowledge. And, further, this knowledge is the upshot of something which the person can do.
Influenced by the philosophy of Tyler Burge, Frank defends a rationalistic position according to which the source of the norms which govern thought and judgment are of an objective kind. Fundamentally, this means that a representational ability must be grounded in some systematic, non-representational relation to some subject matter
Endre Begby
Endre Begby has a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh, and a Cand. Philol. from the University of Oslo. He currently teaches at Claremont McKenna College.
Endre works primarily at the intersection of philosophy of mind and language, with extensions into metaphysics, epistemology, and action theory, and in political philosophy. He also has broad historical interests, in particular in ancient and modern philosophy. Endre’s dissertation, On the Structure of Communicative Understanding (Pittsburgh, 2008), develops a social externalist model of the interrelations between semantic ascription, psychological attribution, and action explanation. In his next large scale project, tentatively entitled Cognition and Communication: New Foundations for Contextualism, he aims to develop this model further to defend a radical form of semantic and psychological contextualism.
In political philosophy, Endre works mostly on global justice and the role of human rights in international affairs. He takes a special interest in questions concerning state sovereignty and intervention, and has more recently also become interested in exploring the relations between governance, poverty, and conflict. Some of his work in political philosophy is done in collaboration with colleagues from the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), where Endre is a research associate.
Among Endre’s publications are The Ethics of War: Classic and Contemporary Readings (co-edited with Greg Reichberg and Henrik Syse, Blackwell, 2006), “Liberty, Statehood, and Sovereignty: Walzer on Mill on Non-Intervention” (Journal of Military Ethics 2(1), pp. 46-62), and “Leibniz on Determinism and Divine Foreknowledge” (Studia Leibnitiana 30(1), pp. 83-98).
Homepage: endrebegby.synthasite.com/
Lene Bomann-Larsen
Lene Bomann-Larsen started
working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Philosophy,
Classics, History of Art and Ideas on 1 January 2008 with funding
from The Norwegian Research Council, and has been affiliated with
the CSMN since May 2008. She is also affiliated with the Ethics
Programme at the University of Oslo. Lene has her Ph.D from the
University of Oslo in 2007.
The basic issue of Lene’s current project is how we justify attributing moral responsibility to ourselves and others, and searches for the foundations of responsibility attribution as well as the implications of such attribution for issues of legal and political philosophy. Her research interests include foundational issues in moral philosophy; in addition to the issue of responsibility she is interested in normative ethical theory in general, as well as methodological challenges at the empirical/normative intersection. Her interests also include political philosophy (in particular questions of legitimacy, and rights theory), philosophy of law (in particular theories of punishment), and the ethics of war.
Lene’s doctoral dissertation was on the topic of the moral equality of soldiers. Recent publications include 'Revisionism and Desert' in Criminal Law and Philosophy (2009). DOI 10.1007/s11572-009-9081-x and 'Private versus Citizen-soldiers: armed contractors in a just-war framework', in Bailliet, Cecilia (ed): Security. A Multidisciplinary Normative Approach. International Humanitarian Law series, Martinus Nijhoff pub, 2009. Lene is also editor of the Viewpoint Column in the Journal of Peace Research and member of the steering committee for the Nordic Network in Political Ethics (funded by NordForsk).
E-mail: lene.bomann-larsen@hf.uio.no
Einar Duenger Bøhn (Bohn)
Einar is a Postdoctorial Fellow in the Ethics Programme at the
University of Oslo. He has his PhD from the University of
Massachusetts Amherst 2009 under the supervision of Jonathan
Schaffer, and a Masters from the University of Oslo 2004 under the
supervision of Olav Gjelsvik. Einar's areas of specialization are
metaphysics, philosophical logic, and
meta-ethics. In the former areas he works on issues concerning the
nature of concrete objects, physical objects, mereology, identity,
and dispositions. In the latter area he works on issues concerning
the nature of response-dependency, intrinsic values, and emotions.
He also works
extensively on the question of the meaning and/or absurdity of
human existence. Other interests are Locke, Descartes, C.S.Peirce,
the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of religion. Einar also
believes ordinary language is philosophically overrated.
Einar has published in Analysis as well as Philosophical Quarterly.
He also has a website:
http://folk.uio.no/einardb/
as well as a bunch of kids, a beautiful wife, and a couple of fish;
all of which at the present moment live happily together in
Oslo.
Jakob Elster
Jakob Elster is a postdoctoral fellow at the Ethics Programme at the University of Oslo. He got his Ph.D. from the University of Oslo in 2007. His research interests are mainly in ethics in a broad sense: normative ethics, meta-ethics and applied ethics (in particular bioethics), political philosophy, and moral psychology. In his postdoctoral project, Elster will examine what role should be given to facts about moral psychology when doing moral theory.
Recent publications are 'Wrongful Life, Suicide, and Euthanasia' in 'Ethics and the Life Sciences: Special Conference Supplement, Journal of Philosophical Research' (2007) and 'Hva skal vi med etiske komiteer?' in 'Etikk i Praksis - Nordic Journal of Applied Ethics' (2007).
E-mail: jakob.elster@ifikk.uio.no
Ingrid Lossius Falkum 
Ingrid Lossius Falkum is a PhD student in pragmatics in the Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London (UCL), and an affiliate of the CSMN, University of Oslo as of May 2008. She has an MA in pragmatics from UCL (2005) and an MA in French linguistics from the University of Oslo (2004).
Ingrid’s main research interests lie in lexical semantics/pragmatics and relevance theory. The central topic of her PhD thesis is the phenomenon of polysemy, and how it relates to the distinction between linguistically encoded and pragmatically inferred meaning. To what extent is polysemy semantic, to what extent is it pragmatic, and how is it to be treated within relevance theory? The thesis also investigates the more general issues of what and how the linguistic code contributes to the understanding of words in context, and the relationship between semantically encoded meaning (logical form) and conceptual representation (language of thought).
Publications include: ‘Generativity, relevance and the problem of polysemy’ in UCL Working Papers in Linguistics (2007), ‘A relevance-theoretic analysis of concept narrowing and broadening in English and Norwegian original texts and translations’ in Languages in Contrast 7:2 (2007), and ‘Liberal: et begrep tømt for innhold?’ in Nytt Norsk Tidsskrift (2008).
E-mail: i.falkum@ucl.ac.uk
Espen Gamlund
Espen Gamlund works as a Research
Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art
and Ideas, the Ethics Programme, and an affiliate with the CSMN,
University of Oslo. He is also a Guest Researcher at the Centre for
Development and the Environment, where he teaches a Masters Course
in Environmental Ethics and Philosophy, as well as an organizer of
the Environmental Ethics seminar series (Seminaret i
Miljøetikk).
In his PhD project Espen examines the status of forgiveness in moral philosophy. The central question to be discussed is when we should forgive those who wrong us. Two arguments are central to his thesis. Firstly, that we sometimes have a duty to forgive those who repent and apologize for the wrong they make. Secondly, that forgiving those who (for some reason) do not repent and apologize for the wrong they have done is beyond duty or supererogatory. The thesis also explores other issues in the moral philosophy of forgiveness.
Espen's research interests include various issues in ethics and moral philosophy, as well as the philosophy of Spinoza. He is also interested in environmental ethics and animal ethics, especially the moral status of animals. His publications include ‘Who has Moral Status in the Environment? A Spinozistic Answer’, The Trumpeter, Vol. 23, Nr 1, 2007, pp. 3-27.; ‘Arne Naess’s Humanistic Ethic’, The Trumpeter, Vol. 22, Nr 2, 2006, p 104- 117.
E-mail: espen.gamlund@ifikk.uio.no
Home-page: folk.uio.no/espeng
Robert Huseby
Robert Huseby is a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Political Science, and an associated member of the Ethics Programme at the University of Oslo. His fellowship is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Robert received his Ph. D from the University of Oslo in 2008. In his postdoctoral project, Robert will investigate questions concerning the just distribution of burdens arising from climate change.
Recent publications include. ”Duties and Responsibilities towards the Poor,” Res Publica, 14 (2008): 1-18, and ”Liberalism, Tolerance, and Human Rights,” Nordisk Tidsskrift for menneskerettigheter (Nordic Journal of Human Rights), 25 (2007): 245-58.
Email: robert.huseby@ifikk.uio.no
Terje Lohndal
Terje Lohndal is a PhD student in the Department of Linguistics
at the University of Maryland. He got his BA from the University of
Oslo in June 2008, and is also affiliated with the Nordic Center of
Excellence in Microcomparative Syntax which is directed by the
Center for Advanced Study in Theoretical Linguistics at the
University of Tromsø.
Terje conducts his research within generative grammar as pioneered
and developed by Noam Chomsky. He works mainly on syntactic theory
from a synchronic and diachronic perspective, focusing among others
on the relationship between the invariant principles that are part
of our Language Faculty and the variation among various languages.
Language acquisition is another of his main interests, in
particular how children acquire questions. In addition, Terje is
very interested in cognitive science generally, and especially the
relationship between generative cognitive principles and the human
Language Faculty.
Recent publications include ‘That-t in Scandinavian and elsewhere’
in Working Papers in Scandinavian Syntax 79 (2007), ‘On the
structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian’ in
Nominal determination. Typology, context constrains, and historical
emergence (2007, John Benjamins) and the forthcoming ‘Comp-t
effects: Variation in the position and features of C’ in Studia
Linguistica.
Terje is also a member of the Editorial Team of Biolinguistics.
E-mail: terje@umd.edu
Gry Oftedal
Gry Oftedal started her post doc. at IFIKK in October 2007 with
a grant from the Norwegian Research Council, and has been
affiliated with CSMN since September 2008. She recently had a
visiting fellowship at the Institute of Philosophy, School of
Advanced Studies, University of London, and worked before that at
the University of Copenhagen with philosophy of science and medical
ethics. Gry has her PhD from the University of Oslo (the Ethics
Programme), 2007, and her MA in biology from the Norwegian
University of Life Sciences, 2001.
Gry is mainly working with philosophy of biology on the project
Conceptualizing Genetic Causation and Genetic Information in a
Systems Biology Framework, exploring causal connections
between genes and the development of lower-level and higher-level
traits/properties; how they are and should be represented. She also
works with relations between scientific levels and with
difference-making theories of causation.
Her publications include Heritability and Genetic
Causation in Philosophy of Science (2005): 72, 5 Questions
in Evolutionary Theory co-edited with J.K.B. Olsen, P. Rossel
and M. Norup, forthcoming on Automatic Press, New York, and
Functional Stability and Systems Level Causation,
co-authored with A. Strand, forthcoming in Philosophy of
Science.
Email: gry.oftedal@ifikk.uio.no
Jon Anstein Olsen
Jon Anstein Olsen is a PhD fellow at the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages (ILOS), in the field of North America Area Studies. He is a member of the Ethics Programme’s research school and an affiliate of the CSMN. Jon has studied classical culture at the Norwegian institutes in Athens and Rome, American political thought at the University of Virginia, and British and American politics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He has an MA (hovedfag) in English from NTNU, with a specialization in American political thought.
Tor
Otterholt
Tor Otterholt is a PhD Fellow at the Ethics Programme and the
Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. He holds
an M. Phil. in Political Theory from Oxford University, and Cand.
Mag. in Economics and Russian language and literature from the
Universities of Oslo and Bergen, respectively.
In his PhD project, called “Should the State cultivate
cost-efficient tastes”, Tor discusses whether the State should
endeavor to increase the efficiency rate at which the citizens
convert resources into well-being. Under which conditions would
this strategy for policy making be legitimate? Examining this
question, Tor discusses various conceptions of legitimacy and
well-being, and makes reference to recent developments in fields
such as Behavioural and Happiness Economics and Moral and Political
Philosophy.
Further info: http://www.etikkprogrammet.uio.no/otterholt.html
E-mail: tor.otterholt@stv.uio.no
Tel: +47 99 15 85 88
John Richard Sageng
John Richard Sageng works in the interpretational tradition in the study of meaning and the philosophy of mind. His main interest is in the thesis that beliefs are “inherently veridical” due to the nature of belief attribution in third-person interpretation.
He is occupied with several issues that are fundamental for the prospects of establishing a connection of this sort, such as the justification for the principle of charity as an a priori requirement for interpretation, the arguments based on the “seeming-being” distinction that aim to show that conceptual content presupposes possession of a language, as well as the nature of causal explanations in rationalization of behavior.
Sageng has been teaching courses on a number related subjects at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Idea (IFIKK) in Oslo, and has contributed to his area in the capacity of organizer, book editor and writer. He is presently working on a Ph. D. thesis at IFIKK that is titled “Triangulation and the Objectivity of Thought”.
E-mail: j.r.sageng@ifikk.uio.no
Anders Strand
Anders Strand is a post doctoral research fellow at the Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Art and Ideas, with funding from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Oslo (starting November 2008). His main research interests are in philosophy of science, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, and he is currently working on the philosophical foundations of systems biology, as well as more general questions about reductionism and causation in biology. Strand obtained his PhD in philosophy of mind from the University of Oslo (2008), and he has spent two semesters as a visiting scholar at Rutgers University(2005-2006).
His publications include: "Functional Stability and Systems Level Causation", co-authored with Gry Oftedal, forthcoming in Philosophy of Science 2009, "Immense Multiple Realization" in Metaphysica, International Journal for Ontology and Metaphysics 8(1):61-78 2007, and "The Ruthless Reductionist, a Conversation with John Bickle" in Filosofisk Supplement Nr.2, 2007.
E-mail:
anders.strand@ifikk.uio.no
Homepage: http://folk.uio.no/anderstr
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