Ragna Talea Oeynhausen, M.A.
Doctoral Fellow, Student Assistant
Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language, Chair of Theoretical Philosophy, MCMP
Personal information
I am a doctoral fellow at the MCMP under the supervision of Hannes Leitgeb. Prior to that, I obtained a B.Sc. in Mathematics (with a minor in philosophy) from the University of Bonn, as well as a M.A. in Theoretical Philosophy from LMU Munich. Moreover, I have spent one semester at National Taiwan University in Taipei studying philosophy and Chinese language.
Research interests
I am broadly interested in the notion of existence as well as its interplay with quantification, meaning, and singular terms. Consequently, my research touches on issues in logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of language. In my PhD, I am working on ontological disagreements, in particular, the meaningful (non-contradictory) denial of existential claims. To this end, I am developing a truthmaker semantics for positive free logic allowing empty singular terms (e.g."Sherlock Holmes") both to be treated as genuinely non-referring and to appear in true atomic formulas. Moreover, I argue that the truthmaker approach provides a philosophically plausible account of the truth of such empty-termed atomic formulas (e.g. "Sherlock Holmes lives in London"). Lastly, I explore how the notion of hyperintensionality can be applied to metaontological disputes.