Dr. Dominik Ehrenfels

Personal information

I am a postdoctoral associate on the DFG funded research project The Effective World, run by Sébastien Rivat.

Before that, I completed the BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy at Oxford, and bachelor’s degrees in physics and philosophy at the LMU.

Research interests

My interests lie primarily in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of physics. For the DFG project on effective theories, my plan is to focus on issues of emergence and the autonomy of higher-level theories. My DPhil Thesis is concerned with the role of symmetries in the interpretation of theories, and specifically with the way reformulation can help us eliminate symmetry-variant structure. Related to this, I am particularly interested in Julian Barbour’s relationalism and shape dynamics. Besides that, I have secondary interests in the philosophy of logic (esp. logical conventionalism) and metaphysics (esp. material plenitude).

Selected publications

1. Ehrenfels, D. [forthcoming]: ‘Reviving Reduction’, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science

2. Ehrenfels, D. [forthcoming]: 'Logical Conventionalism and Deflationary Truth', Erkenntnis