Dr. Boris Demarest

Personal information

I am an Assistant Professor on the chair of Metaphysics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and a Guest Professor at Ghent University.

I studied philosophy at Ghent University and was awarded my PhD there in 2016 with a dissertation on the implications of Kant's reflections on the life sciences for his critical philosophy. After my PhD, I taught history of philosophy and history and philosophy of science at the University of Amsterdam (2016-2018) and then worked as wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter to Prof. Peter McLaughlin at the University of Heidelberg (2018-2023). From April 2023 to January 2025 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the department for philosophy and moral science at the Ghent University, where I worked on the project Human life? From philosophy of life to philosophical anthropology: a transnational and transdisciplinary inquiry, funded by the FWO Flanders.

Research interests

History of natural philosophy, with a specific interest in early modern philosophy up to and including Kant, the history and philosophy of science, specifically of the life sciences, and the history of the philosophy of science.

Selected Publications

• Van den Berg, H. & Demarest, B. (2024). “Induction and certainty in the physics of Wolff and Crusius”. British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
  Online first: Full article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09608788.2023.2291031
• Demarest, B. & van den Berg, H. (2022). “Kant’s Theory of Scientific Hypotheses in its Historical Context”. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 92: 12-19.
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.shpsa.2022.01.011
• Demarest, B. (2021). “Soul, Archeus, and Nature in van Helmont's Medical Naturalism”. HOPOS 11(2): 564-584.
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1086/715877
• van den Berg, H. & Demarest, B. (2020). “Axiomatic Natural Philosophy and the Emergence of Biology as a Science”. Journal of the History of Biology 53: 379–422.
  DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-020-09609-2
• Demarest, B. (2019). “The New Axiomatic Method: Bachelard on the Meaning and Deformation of Concepts”, Parrhesia 31: 207-231.
  DOI: http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia31/parrhesia31_demarest.pdf
• Demarest, B. (2017) “Kant’s Epigenesis: Specificity and Developmental Constraints”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39:3.
  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40656-017-0129-2
• Demarest, B. & Wolfe, C. T. (2017) “The organism as reality or as fiction: Buffon and beyond”, History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 39:2.
  DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s40656-016-0128-8