PhD Students
Visiting Address: Georg Morgenstiernes hus, 6th floor
Mailing Address: CSMN, P.O. Box 1020, Blindern 0315, Norway
Heine A. Holmen
Heine is a member of CSMN's Rational Agency and is currently working on a project under supervision of Carsten M. Hansen (UiO/CSMN) and Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck College/CSMN) that concerns the problem of agency and other foundational issues in philosophy of action, moral psychology and the metaphysics of mind and -rationality. The task is to explore, develop and employ a basic framework for understanding the rational human agent and what s/he does in her capacity as agent. It is to hope that such an understanding will tell us more about the nature of agents, -actions and -reasons for acting, and that this in turn may help us appreciate the significant contribution human agency makes in a world of natural events. In addition it might help us to ground and understand better the nature of normativity and -human freedom, and to illuminate morally relevant notions such as moral responsibility and autonomy.
Heine joined the CSMN as a doctoral fellow December 2007, the same year as he finished his MA degree in philosophy at the University of Oslo under supervision of CSMN core group member, Carsten M. Hansen. In his MA thesis - ‘The Primacy of Knowledge: A Critical Survey of Timothy Williamson’s Views on Knowledge, Assertion and Scepticism’ - he investigated Timothy Williamson’s views on the nature of knowledge and the centrality of this notion for an understanding of mind and epistemic- or theoretical rationality, as well as Williamson's application of his framework to reject scepticism about knowledge. His current research interests are mainly in the metaphysics of mind, -agency, and -rationality, in addition to meta-ethics, moral psychology and normative ethics. Heine has previously been a six months visitor at Birkbeck College (London) in 2008 and a one-year visitor at Rutgers Centre for Cognitive Science (RuCCS) at Rutgers State University in 2009. Now he is back in Oslo for 2010 and currently convening the Language- and Rationality Seminar: http://www.csmn.uio.no/events/l&r-seminar/
Homepage: http://sites.google.com/site/philosopherheineholmen/
Academia: http://uio.academia.edu/HeineHolmen
Blog: weirdmetaphysics.blogspot.com/
Contact: h.a.holmen[at]csmn.uio.no
Torfinn Huvenes
Homepage: http://www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/om-instituttet/ansatte/vit/torfinh.xml
(More information about Torfinn will be posted soon)
Georg Kjøll
Georg Kjøll submitted his PhD thesis 'Word meaning, concepts and the representation of abstract entities from the perspective of radical pragmatics and semantic externalism' November 2010. He is currently working at CSMN/IFIKK on a thesis completion stipend which runs until November 2011.
Georg's research interests lie in pragmatics, philosophy of linguistics and philosophy of mind. He is particularly interested in the question of meaning in language and thought, his thesis work focusing on mental and linguistic representation. Taking as its starting points relevance theoretic pragmatics and informational semantics, Georg has tried to develop a constructive account of the representation of abstract entities ('love', 'happiness', 'feminism', 'democracy'). In so doing, his (yet to be examined) thesis touches on several adjacent subjects, including the philosophy of cognitive science, developmental psychology, the epistemology of testimony and moral psychology. The thesis was supervised by Professors Deirdre Wilson and Jan Terje Faarlund from the Linguistic Agency Programme.
Georg graduated with an MA in Pragmatics from University College London in 2007. He holds a BA in Language Studies from the University of Oslo, where his main field of study was rhetorics and communication. Formerly a student of Literature and French, he maintains a strong academic interest in poetics and stylistics, as well as creative language use and linguistic aspects of miscommunication.
The spring term of 2011, he co-teaches CSMN 4021, Pragmatics and Relevance Theory, with Nicholas Allott and Ingrid Falkum.
For more information, see Georg's homepage, his Twitter account or Tumblr site
Kari Refsdal
Kari Refsdal is a member of the group on moral agency. The overall question of her project is the following: is there a necessary connection between rational agency and moral agency? The way she understands this question, it amounts to the following: does any rational agent have a reason to act as she is morally obligated to act?
More information on Kari and her project can be found here: http://folk.uio.no/kariref
+47 228 41664
Mathias Sagdahl
Mathias Sagdahl works in the research area of rational agency. The topic of his project is the relationship between rationality and normative facts. Mathias aims to develop and defend a pluralistic account of normativity which includes widespread incommensurability of reasons. An important question he tries to answer is how one can rationally respond to such incommensurable reasons. He argues that this calls for an alternative conception of practical reasoning and the role and nature of rationality. Mathias got his MA-degree from the University of Oslo in June 2008, and started his Ph.D. in February 2009. He has also worked on moral and political philosophy, and is interested in subjects like self-ownership, conscription, and international relations.
He was a visitor at the University of Oxford, from January-June, 2010.
Rachel Sterken
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