Hoefer, Carl

Biography

He did his PhD in Philosophy at Stanford University, under the direction of Peter Galison and Nancy Cartwright. His first academic position was at the University of California, Riverside. In 1998 he moved to the London School of Economics to join the department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. In 2001-2002, just before joining ICREA, he became Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences at LSE (CPNSS). Since autumn of 2002 he has been an ICREA and member of the UAB philosophy department. From 2005-2013 he was coordinator of the research group GRECC based at the UAB. Since June 2009, he has been Editor in Chief of a new international journal, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, published by Springer. In July 2013 he began a leave of absence from ICREA to take up the Directorship of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University in Canada (www.rotman.uwo.ca), and he returned to ICREA in July 2015.

Research Interest

His research has mostly addressed age-old metaphysical questions by examining the metaphysics of nature that flows from our best scientific theories. In particular, he works on the nature of space, time and motion as revealed by physics (especially, Einstein's theories of relativity); and on the nature of objective probability as revealed by its uses in many branches of science and other human activities. At present his research is turning to two traditional big issues in the philosophy of science: scientific realism (i.e., should we take our best scientific theories to be giving us the truth about the world?) and the nature of laws of nature.