Projects
From theory of mind to vicarious perception (TMVP). University of Antwerp
Mind the Gap: Sartre's Anarchy of Thought and Freedom KU Leuven
One of the most fruitful and central insights of Sartre is that consciousness must be understood as pure openness. This means that consciousness cannot be thought of as interiority, as my consciousness, but as an absolute and impersonal condition which is nothing more than the intentional relation to objects that are not consciousness itself. Since consciousness has no foundation (Gr.: an-archè, literally: 'no origin') it ...
ModularExperience : How the modularization of the mind unfolds in the brain. KU Leuven
Modern time-consciousness: philosophy and politics of history - Leo Strauss on history and truth in the relation of theory and praxis. KU Leuven
The first part of the project will clarify a set of problems centering on the ...
The Scientific Revolution in the Classroom. Late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy at the University of Louvain. KU Leuven
The aim of this project is to deepen our understanding of the changing climate in late 17th-century and 18th-century natural philosophy teaching at the University of Louvain. I intend to examine the rise of the mechanical worldview, the rejection of the mathematical Newtonian model of science, and the culmination of both traditions in experimental physics. Special focus will be laid on the challenging question of immediate intelligibility. ...
Senses as tools. A philosophy of the sensory modalities. University of Antwerp
Bringing Bergson Back into the History and Philosophy of Biology Ghent University
In 1907, French philosopher Henri Bergson published a metaphysical interpretation of biological evolution, Creative Evolution. The book became a bestseller and propelled him to international fame. Historians of biology have mostly considered that Bergson’s ideas left little or no lasting impression on biologists. In addition, in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of biology, Bergson’s ideas are widely ignored. However, the problems Bergson ...
Seeing things you don't see: Unifying the philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of multimodal mental imagery (STYDS). University of Antwerp
Rethinking Bergsons Naturalistic Approach in Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. KU Leuven
If evolutionary history were to be replayed from the beginning, what would be the same, and what would be likely different? Would there be a human-like species, multicellularity, or even DNA?
There is a great variety in the answers biologists give to this question, despite having the same access to empirical data and biological theory. For instance, Stephen J. Gould has claimed that evolutionary history is radically contingent, ...