Researchers

Joachim Horvath

PhD Researcher

My main areas of research are epistemology and philosophical methodology, but I have also strong interests in the philosophy of mind and language, in meta-ethics, and in experimental philosophy.

I got an M.A. in philosophy and sociology from the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. My master thesis was an elaboration and defense of the analytic/synthetic distinction. I also spent one year as an exchange student at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where I took courses, among others, with Kenneth Baynes, Noam Chomsky, Patrick Grim and Philip Kitcher (as a guest student at Columbia University). After my M.A., I transferred to the University of Cologne to become a PhD student and research assistant of Thomas Grundmann in the DFG-funded research project “A Defense of Conceptual Analysis against Challenges from Naturalism”. In the spring of 2008, I went to the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the University of Texas at Austin and Rice University as a visiting graduate student for a few weeks. I joined the Emmy Noether Project “Understanding and the A Priori” in April 2009.

In epistemology, I am mainly interested in the theory of knowledge and justification, testimony, social epistemology and the a priori. Generally, I am inclined to externalist approaches and I favor theories of knowledge that explicitly acknowledge the modal dimension of knowledge, like safety accounts. I am also interested in how the many surprising results from cognitive psychology and other empirical disciplines may bear on more traditional epistemological issues. In the future, I would like to do more work on the still somewhat neglected area of meta-epistemology, in particular on the ontology of epistemology and on the nature of epistemic normativity.

Philosophical methodology is the area of my dissertation project, in which I try to defend conceptual analysis as a viable philosophical method against various objections, mainly from naturalistically inclined philosophers. In this connection, I also think about experimental philosophy and its challenge to thought-experiments and other a priori methods, and about the prospects of naturalized epistemology.