Projects

It is well known that Kant intended to follow the three Critiques with a full system of metaphysics, which, whilst following the structure of traditional Wolffian metaphysics, would possess a new legitimacy bestowed by Kant’s prior critique of pure reason. However, little research has been devoted to reconstructing Kant’s projected metaphysics of nature from his sketches and efforts towards its completion. This project proposes to undertake ...

The last decades our higher educational system has known some notable tendencies: growing specialization, functional reduction and dominance of instrumental reason. These evolutions risk to neglect an important aspect in its pedagogical mission which is traditionally linked to Bildung, the development of pupils and students as integral persons. Yet several stakeholders in education feel the need of rearticulating this important ...

Synthetic biology is a new scientific field that gained prominence from the early 2000s. It has been defined as the engineering of biology and the promises that it holds are enormous. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practices of synthetic biologists philosophically: what are synthetic biologists actually aiming for and how does it differ from other and earlier approaches to biology? The main focus is on the idea that synthetic ...

Dance has always had an intimate relation with time. The art form does not only unfold in time, but it also folds the time in which it unfolds itself. The creation of a dance piece always entails the organization of time, the development of a time proper to the piece. Every choreography needs to transform the consecutive gestures into a temporal unity that is shared by the audience and the performers. Since the second half of the twentieth ...

Since the last couple of decades, cultural and social phenomena such as art, religion, language and morality, are increasingly studied from an evolutionary point of view. However, a number of difficulties arise when a biological theory is applied to this subject matter. The goal of this research, with art as a case study, is to map pitfalls and opportunities, in order to contribute to the study of these phenomena, as well as to the expansion ...