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Current Visitors

Current Visitors of the CPNSS

Find out about the current visitors working on CPNSS research projects.

 

Yukinori Iwata

Yukinori Iwata is a professor at Nishogakusha University and works in behavioral welfare economics. He has provided a microeconomic foundation for Joshua Greene’s (2013) modular myopia hypothesis to explain how people make moral judgments on the trolley problem. His current research interest focuses on the testable implications of cooperative behavior under simple Kantian equilibrium proposed by John Roemer (2019).

Dates of visit: March 2024 - March 2025

Email: Y.Iwata@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Individual Moral Judgment and Normative Evaluation

The research question of Iwata’s project is what kind of cognitive mechanism people’s moral judgments follow and how to evaluate people’s actions and public policies based on their moral judgments. To achieve this goal, his project adopts a behavioral welfare economics approach in which normative implications are derived from people’s actual actions and judgments. His project does not aim to propose a moral principle that resolves real-world moral dilemmas. Rather, it aims to provide a prescription for people’s actions and public policies under the dilemmas. Iwata will write a book on welfare economics and moral psychology and complete three papers, one of which is on evaluating choice architecture under a policymaker’s dilemma.

 

Sena Bozdag

Sena Bozdag is a postdoctoral researcher and a member of the DFG-GACR Research Project CELIA run by Prof. Dr. Olivier Roy (University of Bayreuth) and by Marta Bílková (Institute of Computer Science, Czech Academy of Sciences)

Her current research is focused on the topics of non-classical epistemic logics, group epistemic notions, and feminist perspectives in logic. She has a background in Philosophy and Philosophical Logic. She obtained her PhD from Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP), LMU Munich, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Hannes Leitgeb. Her dissertation is titled "Belief Revision Based on Information States Hyperintensionality, Fragmentation, and Consistency".

Dates of visit: March 2025

Email: s.bozdag@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Common Knowledge and Publicity

The various mathematical definitions of common knowledge have often been associated with the pre-theoretical notions of something being "public information", or "out in the open". This association is particularly salient in philosophy of collective action. The aim of this project is to propose philosophical and formal arguments to the effect that "Lewisian common knowledge" meets some of the challenges facing classical mathematical accounts of common knowledge and is a plausible account of publicity. Natural extensions of this research address also the associations between common knowledge and various other collective attitudes such as public awareness or public attention.

 

Valeriya Chasova

Valeriya Chasova is a Junior Research Fellow at the Department of History of Physical and Mathematical Sciences of the Institute for the History of Science and Technology of Russian Academy of Sciences (IHST RAS), as well as an associated member of the Centre for Philosophy of Sciences and Societies (CEFISES) of the Université Cathiolique de Louvain where she defended her PhD in 2019. She visits the CPNSS at the LSE thanks to a European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) fellowship. Valeriya Chasova is competent in, and does research at the intersection of, philosophy, history, philology, physics and mathematics. She is particularly interested in ontology of theoretical symmetries.

Dates of visit: March 2025

Email: vchasova@unistra.fr

Research Project

Investigating Symmetries with History and Philosophy

Symmetries of physical theories can represent empirical symmetries and predict conservation phenomena, entail equations of motion and conservation laws. But it is still unclear when and which theoretical symmetries are ontologically significant. The project aims at clarifying this by philosophical and historical methods alike.

 

Daniel Häuser

Daniel Häuser is a doctoral candidate in political philosophy and an associate member of the DFG Graduate Program “Collective Decision Making” at Hamburg University. He writes about justice in migration, political legitimacy, democracy, and theories of moral rights. In his thesis, he investigates the justice and legitimacy of immigration restrictions, and the relationship between these two dimensions of normative evaluation.  

Dates of visit: January 2025 - September 2025

Email: d.hauser2@lse.ac.uk

Website: https://danielhaeuser.com/

 

Research Project

Claiming Authority Across Borders: Towards a Cosmopolitan Statism 

Many political philosophers believe that demanding obligations of egalitarian justice and democratic inclusion arise only in distinctive political relationships, which are characterized by subjection to a coercively enforced system of political rule. Do states and their citizens stand in such political relationships to migrants and refugees, or do such relationships end at state borders? This question lies at the core of an ongoing debate in the philosophy of migration between proponents of statist and cosmopolitan accounts of justice in migration. In this project, I explore a novel intermediary view, which combines attractive features of the cosmopolitan and the statist position. This intermediary view is based on the idea that there are two distinct kinds of political relationships, which ground distinct sets of political obligations. I argue that political relationships of a weak kind extend beyond state borders, while political relationships of a strong kind obtain only between the citizens of legitimate states. Cosmopolitans are therefore right to insist that states have political obligations towards foreigners, while statists are right to insist that these obligations are more limited in scope than domestic political obligations.

 

Jesse Hamilton

Jesse Hamilton is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He focuses his research and writing on the intersection of philosophy of science and political philosophy. Currently, he is working on an account of values in science grounded in the idea of public reason. Before Penn, Jesse served in the U.S. Army and then worked in finance.

Dates of visit: March 2024 - March 2025

Email: J.Hamilton3@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Public Reason and Values in Science

Public reason, which requires adopting rules justifiable to all under their authority, is essential for justice in liberal democracies. Given the role of science in rule formation, there is growing interest in connecting the idea of public reason to ongoing discussions about values in science. This project aims to tackle two foundational questions related to public reason and values in science: Should public reason regulate scientific research, and if so, in what ways? Does public reason impose duties on members of the scientific community? If so, what are the duties, and to whom do they apply?

 

Benedikt Leitgeb 

Benedikt Leitgeb received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Salzburg. He is now a doctoral candidate at the University of Salzburg, supervised by Prof. Charlotte Werndl (University of Salzburg) and Prof. Christian List (LMU Munich). His PhD project focuses on the scientific advice provided by expert groups, in particular immunisation advisory groups. He is also part of the Clust of Excellence “Knowledge in Crisis” in Austria, a cooperation between the CEU, the University of Vienna, the University of Graz and the University of Salzburg. He specialises in general philosophy of science and social epistemology.

Dates of visit: October 2024 - March 2025

Email: b.leitgeb@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Groups That Advise: On the Epistemology of Immunisation Advisory Groups

Expert groups are increasingly involved in policy making, this became especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although philosophers of science have done extensive work on how individual scientists should (and should not be) involved in policy making, little work has focused on groups as groups, and how they should ideally provide policy advice. The main aim of this project is to combine insights from collective epistemology with insights from the discussions on scientific policy advice to draw conclusions about how scientific advisory groups can provide effective and good scientific advice.

 

Raja Panjwani

Raja Panjwani is a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Biology at Georgetown University, working at the intersection of evolutionary biology and economic theory. He is also a consulting researcher at Microsoft Research in New York, where he works on human-oriented AI. Raja studied philosophy of science at Western Ontario and Oxford prior to completing his PhD in Economics at the NYU Stern School of Business in 2024. 

Dates of visit: January 2025 – May 2025

Email: r.panjwani1@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

A Model of Reflective Equilibrium

Reflective Equilibrium is an epistemic state in which one's evaluative judgments cohere with general principles justifying those judgments. This project will build on recent work in reason-based choice to develop a formal model of reflective equilibrium. In particular, the project will study how epistemic states which are out-of-equilibrium can be revised to approach equilibrium, and how various cognitive procedures impact the revision process. The project also seeks to characterize a notion of 'shared reflective equilibrium', the pursuit of which is at the heart of deliberative democratic institutions. The hope is that a formal model of the deliberation process can shed light on conditions for convergence versus polarization. 

As part of the Cohesive Capitalism Programme, Dr Panjwani will also be teaching seminars for PP406 Philosophy for Public Policy in the Department of Philosophy this Winter Term.

 

Marc Raguz

Originally from Australia, Marc is currently in the second year of his PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He received his master’s in philosophy from the University of Salzburg and his Bachelor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering from the University of Queensland. His areas of interest are philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and philosophy of mathematics.

Dates of visit: January 2025 – April 2025

Email: m.raguz@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Multiscale modelling, uncertainty, and inductive risk: Policy-making and challenges surrounding fusion energy.

His research is centred on complex (multiscale) modelling and the nature of scientific uncertainty in the fusion context, with a particular focus on the inductive risks and policy-making challenges surrounding the engineering, design, study, and application of fusion systems.

Marc works closely with philosophers of science at both the University of Edinburgh and within the broader philosophical community, together with the scientists and engineers at UKAEA, to gain clarity about the intricate conceptual challenges inherent in fusion energy, as well as how to approach policy-making in such an unfamiliar and uncertain environment. 

 

Wang Shuyu

Wang Shuyu is a master’s student from Shanxi University. His research interests lie in general philosophy of science, with a specific focus on scientific representation and scientific models. His work also extends to thought experiment and computer simulation.

Dates of visit: September 2024 - March 2025

Email: w.shuyu@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Idealization in Scientific Models: Controversy and a Potential Defense

Within the study of scientific models, representationalism posits that a model’s explanatory power stems from its ability to represent a target system to a certain degree. This view has gained considerable traction among scholars. However, Wang Shuyu, through concrete modeling examples, found that representationalism faces certain theoretical dilemmas when explaining idealization. He analyzes the root causes of these difficulties and draws on a non-representational perspective to interpret the role of idealization. This, however, does not imply that representationalism is entirely flawed. The two viewpoints provide a complementary framework for understanding model explanations.

 

Percy Venegas Obando

Percy Venegas is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal on AI Policy and Complex Systems (Policy Studies Organization, Washington, DC). His expertise covers a wide-ranging knowledge base that spans multiple disciplines in both the sciences and humanities, including doctor of engineering studies in Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning (GWU), alongside graduate studies spanning the MSc in Software and Systems Security at Oxford, MSc in Finance and Banking at King’s College London; MSc in Epistemology, Ethics, and Philosophy of Mind at Edinburgh; a Masters in Sustainable Development and Corporate Responsibility at EOI in Spain; an MBA from MIB Trieste; and a licentiate degree in Electronic Engineering (ITCR). He has also completed lifelong learning and executive education programs at The Wharton School (Private Wealth Management), The New England Complex Systems Institute (VUCA: Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity), The Santa Fe Institute (Collective Intelligence), Oxford’s Continuing Education (Quantum Computing), The Saïd Business School (Oxford AI Programme), The Aspen Institute Socrates Program (From AI to C-Creation), and the LSE (Ethics in AI), among others. Percy is an affiliate of the King’s Institute for Artificial Intelligence (King’s College London). 

Percy’s practice follows an interdisciplinary and multi-agent approach, using evolutionary algorithms that connect ideas from different domains, exploiting curiosity and co-creativity and leading to innovative insights for problem-solving, policy design, and decision-making. His research interests include the Philosophy of Scientific Modelling, Neuroaesthetics, and Epistemic Uncertainty.

Date of visit: August 2024 – August 2025

Email: p.obando@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Ethics, Neuro-aesthetics, and Evolutionary Modelling

Neuroaesthetics seeks neural correlates of beauty, surprise, and desire, including moral goodness and beauty judgments. Despite intriguing findings like the orbitofrontal cortex's involvement in moral judgment, beauty judgment, and decision-making, the neural apparatus's complexity hinders many potentially illuminating analyses. Computational evolutionary modelling offers an alternative approach. Time-evolving models using empirical data and generative heuristics create novel representations of systems or datasets. Evolutionary techniques measure the asymmetry in model agreement within an ensemble, providing automated hypothesis generation and inherent epistemic uncertainty. Propositions with certain goodness of fit interact in consensus with measurable aesthetic symmetrical qualities, while dissensus serves as an explanatory artifact for model ensemble uncertainty. The central question is: can aesthetics assist a modeler in gaining understanding?

 

Catherine Saint-Croix

Catharine Saint-Croix is Stephen R. Setterberg, M.D. Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Their research interests include attention, epistemology, feminist philosophy, and formal modelling. They received their PhD at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2018.

Date of visit: March 2025

Email: c.saintcroix@lse.ac.uk

Research Project

Attention and Epistemic Networks

While visiting CPNSS, Prof Saint-Croix will be researching the role of attention in epistemic networks using agent-based modelling paradigms. As an emerging field, the epistemology of attention has largely focused on the very small or the very large: individuals’ patterns of attention or those prevalent in broad social contexts. But the space in between—research communities, neighbourhoods, friend groups—is a crucial level of analysis for understanding how individual epistemic practices, attention included, interact. In collaboration with Dr Jingyi Wu, Prof Saint-Croix aims to show that modelling attention in epistemic networks can help to unify disparate observations and provide new insights, especially concerning polarization, propaganda, and misinformation.

 

Orri Steffánson

Orri Stefánsson is a professor of practical philosophy and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at Stockholm University. He has been in Stockholm since 2015. Before that he did a postdoc in Paris, and before that he was a PhD student at the LSE (graduating in 2014).

Date of visit: March 2025

Email: h.stefansson@lse.ac.uk

 

Research Project

Evaluating and managing risks and chances

During his visit to CPNSS, Orri Stefánsson will be working on a book manuscript together with Richard Bradley. The aim of the book is to systematise, extend, and further develop their prior critique of, and suggested alternative to, orthodox decision theory (in particular, the way in which the orthodoxy treats risks and chances).

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