Jonathan Reiser
Doctoral Fellow
Research Center for Neurophilosophy and Ethics of Neurosciences
Personal information
Jonathan Reiser earned his Bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Economics as well as his Master's degree in Philosophy at the University of Potsdam. His Bachelor's thesis focused on "Non-Analysable Elements of States of Affairs in Wittgenstein's Tractatus," while his Master's thesis explored the role of intuitive thinking in evaluating counterfactual conditionals ("The Role of Intuition in Theorizing").
Alongside his studies, Jonathan Reiser conducted various tutorials on logic and academic methodology using canonical texts of analytic philosophy.
Research interests
Philosophy of language, epistemology, philosophy of science with a focus on cognitive sciences.
PhD project
In his doctoral research, Jonathan Reiser investigates how classifications within the cognitive sciences can be most effectively developed. The aim is to adapt the concept of natural kinds, which has been fruitful in other disciplines, to the field of cognitive sciences and to develop a notion of "cognitive kinds." This approach takes neural mechanisms seriously as indispensable for the classification of mental states while avoiding the reduction of mental predicates to neural states.
As an interdisciplinary project, it connects to issues within the philosophy of mind (e.g., understanding the relationship between the mental and the physiological), epistemology and philosophy of science (e.g. the problem of induction, the nature of natural kinds), and the philosophy of language (e.g. the function of general terms in cognitive scientific theories, counterfactual conditionals). Additionally, it has practical implications for research within the cognitive sciences, not only by addressing the consequences for classificatory practices but also by aiming to clarify conceptual connections between different subfields (e.g. psychology and biology).
The PhD is supervised by Stephan Sellmaier (primary advisor) and Stephan Hartmann (secondary advisor). The project is supported by a doctoral scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).