Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences

Research products

All my research products

Selected research products

My most significant publication is the monograph "Bayesian Philosophy of Science" (with Stephan Hartmann, Oxford University Press, 2019), which sums up a great part of the research that I have done in the years 2009-2019. It contains numerous applications of the Bayesian formalism to scientific argumentation and to explicating concepts such as degrees of causation, explanatory power and intertheoretic reduction.

Apart from this, I am regularly publishing in international philosophy journals on topics such as the logic and semantics of conditionals, scientific reasoning and the foundations of statistical and causal inference. Sometimes I also publish in science journals on methodological questions.

For a full list of my publications, you can visit my personal website, download them as a pdf file or download them as a .bib file (in case you want to cite them).

For citation statistics, see my Google Scholar site and/or my philpapers/philpeople profile. 

Courses

• Formal Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (FIL0287)
  Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia
• Games, Preferences and Decisions (FIL0227)
  Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia
• Laboratorio di scrittura tesi (FIL0428)
  Corso di laurea in Filosofia
• Laboratorio di scrittura tesi (classe 1-partizione alfabetica A-D) (FIL0428)
  Corso di laurea in Filosofia
• Laboratorio di scrittura tesi (classe 3-partizione alfabetica O-Z) (FIL0428)
  Corso di laurea in Filosofia
• Teoria della scelta sociale (FIL0436)
  Corso di laurea in Filosofia

Research topics

My reserach is mainly in philosophy of science and (formal) epistemology, with particular interest in probabilistic reasoning, causal models and statistical inference. From 2015--2021, I was Principal Investigator of the ERC project "Making Scientific Inferences More Objective".

I have a strong interest in using formal methods (probability in particular) for modeling scientific reasoning, and so some of my work intersects with "classical" formal epistemology, decision theory and conditional reasoning.

I regularly collaborate with social scientists on topics such as improving methods of statistical inference and accounts of scientific explanation.

I am intrigued by questions of decision-making under uncertainty (especially in an environmental context), and I teach two courses on those topics, but my publications in that area are not very recent.

Recently, I have been working a lot on the semantics of indicative conditionals and counterfactuals, and on developing logics for valid inferences in conditional reasoning.

For more information, see my personal homepage.

Activities in agenda

See my calendar

Academic bodies

• Consiglio di Dipartimento

• Consiglio del Corso di laurea in Filosofia
• Responsabile didattico per la mobilità internazionale

• Commissione per l'ammissione al Corso di laurea magistrale in Filosofia - curriculum in inglese (PIC)
• Consiglio del Corso di Laurea magistrale in Filosofia

Office hours

Wednesday afternoon, 14:00--16:00. Office 6/303 on the sixth floor of Palazzo Nuovo.

Please register beforehand at

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1o7T4Z2YEoaPCnh3VLW603qCvPIWpb2eMzKfbYN59jmI/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Students who would like to write a BA or MA thesis with me should look at my editorial guidelines for writing a thesis:
http://www.laeuferpaar.de/LaTeX/EditorialStandards.pdf
and also look at this guide for citation and bibliography:
http://www.laeuferpaar.de/LaTeX/CitationGuidelines.pdf (in Italian!)

Students who write me should use tags in the subject line of the email. With the current email traffic, there is a substantial risk that the email gets lost if not tagged properly.

This means in particular that the first characters of the subject line should be:

---[GPD] for anything related to the course "Games, Preferences and Decisions"

---[FE+PS] for anything related to the course "Formal Epistemology and Philosophy of Science"

---[SCT] for anything related to the course "Teoria della Scelta Sociale" (Social Choice Theory)

---[LAB] for anything related to the "Laboratorio di Scrittura"

---[THESIS] for anything related to a BA or MA thesis

---[ERASMUS] for anything related to Erasmus stays.

Examples are: "[GPD] Term paper" or "[THESIS] New draft".

For really urgent things (graduation deadines, etc.), please use the tag [URGENT], too, e.g., "[GPD] [URGENT] Grade registration".