At present I am not doing proper academic work. I did my PhD at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University, UK. My thesis was about the causal/ontological autonomy of the special sciences focusing on psychology. I was advised by prof. Robin Hendry and prof. Sophie Gibb. I wrote papers on the same subject and on issues connected to the phyilosophy of biology, e.g. organisational accounts of what is to be alive. Worked at the Budapest University of Technology and MTA Research Network (that institution suffered a ridiculus series of name changes in recent years, I stopped counting).
Research interests:
Causation (causal explanation, levels of causation)
Reductionism, emergence (the exclusion problem, the nature of part-whole explanations)
Philosophy of Mind and Biology (mechanisms / mechanistic explanations in the life sciences, system-theoretical accounts of the living, the status of teleological discourse, agency as an ontological category)
With respect to teleological discourse and teleological intuitions I am less skeptical than most contemporary scientists / philosophers. In a research project lead by Kodaj Daniel (teloi.org) we aimed to justify a wide range of teleological intuitions countering the trend that aims to purge teleology from metaphysics and science. In doing so I relied on the so-called organisational view of teleology that gained traction in the last decade. Even though in 2023 I left academia, this very topic became even more interesting / relevant for me personally with the rise of semi(?)-autonomous AI agents.