Short biography

I did my PhD in Philosophy at Stanford University, under the direction of Peter Galison and Nancy Cartwright. My first academic position was  at the University of California, Riverside. In 1998 I moved to the London School of Economics to join the department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method. In 2001-2002, just before joining ICREA, I became Director of the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences at LSE (CPNSS). Since autumn of 2002 I have been an ICREA and member of the UAB philosophy department. From 2005-2013 I was coordinator of the research group GRECC based at the UAB. Since June 2009, I have been Editor in Chief of a new international journal, the European Journal for Philosophy of Science, published by Springer. In July 2013 I 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 I returned to ICREA in July 2015.   

Research interests

My research has mostly addressed age-old metaphysical questions by examining the metaphysics of nature that flows from our best scientific theories. In particular, I work 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.

Key words

Space, time, probability, chance, relativity, physics; science and policy