Kölbel, Max
Professor at Universitat de Barcelona (UB).
Humanities
On leave
Short biography
After two years of studying various subjects at Freie Universität Berlin and acquiring a taste for analytic philosophy, I enrolled at King's College London in 1991, where I subsequently completed an MA (1992), an MPhil (1994) and a PhD (1997) in Philosophy. My first academic appointment was as a postdoc at the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas of the UNAM in Mexico City. Later, I held positions at Swansea (UK), Cambridge University (UK), and the University of Birmingham (UK). I have been ICREA Research Professor at the University of Barcelona since January 2008. I am a member of the research group LOGOS (http://www.ub.edu/grc_logos/). My main interests are in philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and metaethics. Since September 2017 I have been on leave from ICREA in order to take a Position as Professor of Analytic Philosophy and Philosophy of Language at the University of Vienna.
Research interests
My research is in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology and metaethics. I am currently interested in the nature and purpose of semantic theories for natural languages, in the semantics-pragmatics distinction, in the way semantic theories should represent various forms of context dependence (including contextualism/relativism, de se content), in the ways in which language is used to transfer (and possibly generate) knowledge, and in the nature of objectivity.