Stefan Koller
I'm a philosopher of technology trained in the ethics of technology and the ethics of engineering design. My secondary specialization is environmental ethics, with a special focus on the ethics of the built environment.
In my doctoral work, I developed a framework to test moral evaluations of built structures. My larger interests include: a revised theory in aesthetics of architecture that does justice to construction (tectonics), a rehabilitation of key figures associated with 'architecture theory' (including Vitruvius, Semper, and Le Corbusier) as coming equipped with a set of philosophical beliefs about architecture worth reconstructing and assessing from a contemporary (analytic) philosophical point of view. Accordingly, my work overlaps with research done in contemporary architecture theory and history.
I am co-editor of ArchitecturePhilosophy, a peer reviewed international journal on the philosophy of architecture. Please see one of our recent isssue here:
http://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/jispa/issue/view/360
I received my PhD in January 2015 (cum laude) at TU Delft, and hold philosophy degrees from Oxford University.
Supervisors: Maarten Franssen, Michiel Riedijk, and Jeroen van der Hoven
Address: Boulder, Colorado
In my doctoral work, I developed a framework to test moral evaluations of built structures. My larger interests include: a revised theory in aesthetics of architecture that does justice to construction (tectonics), a rehabilitation of key figures associated with 'architecture theory' (including Vitruvius, Semper, and Le Corbusier) as coming equipped with a set of philosophical beliefs about architecture worth reconstructing and assessing from a contemporary (analytic) philosophical point of view. Accordingly, my work overlaps with research done in contemporary architecture theory and history.
I am co-editor of ArchitecturePhilosophy, a peer reviewed international journal on the philosophy of architecture. Please see one of our recent isssue here:
http://ojs.library.okstate.edu/osu/index.php/jispa/issue/view/360
I received my PhD in January 2015 (cum laude) at TU Delft, and hold philosophy degrees from Oxford University.
Supervisors: Maarten Franssen, Michiel Riedijk, and Jeroen van der Hoven
Address: Boulder, Colorado
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Papers by Stefan Koller
This publication summarizes Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action in his 1980 essay collection Essays on Actions and Events. That collection's overarching thesis is that the ordinary concept of causality we employ to render physical processes intelligible should also be employed in describing and explaining human action. In the first of three subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson uses causality to give novel analyses of acting for a reason, of intending, weakness of will, and freedom of will. The second section provides the formal and ontological framework for those analyses. In particular, the logical form and attending ontology of action sentences and causal statements is explored. To uphold the analyses, Davidson urges us to accept the existence of non-recurrent particulars, events, along with that of persons and other objects. The final section employs this ontology of events to provide an anti-reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate that Davidson labels 'anomalous monism'. Events enter causal relations regardless of how we describe them but can, for the sake of different explanatory purposes, be subsumed under mutually irreducible descriptions, claims Davidson. Events qualify as mental if caused and rationalized by reasons, but can be so described only if we subsume them under considerations that are not amenable to codification into strict laws. We abandon those considerations, collectively labelled the 'constitutive ideal of rationality', if we want to explain the physical occurrence of those very same events; in which case we have to describe them as governed by strict laws. The impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between them. The mental and the physical would thus disintegrate were it not for causality, which is operative in both realms through a shared ontology of events.
This publication summarizes Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of action in his 1980 essay collection Essays on Actions and Events. That collection's overarching thesis is that the ordinary concept of causality we employ to render physical processes intelligible should also be employed in describing and explaining human action. In the first of three subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson uses causality to give novel analyses of acting for a reason, of intending, weakness of will, and freedom of will. The second section provides the formal and ontological framework for those analyses. In particular, the logical form and attending ontology of action sentences and causal statements is explored. To uphold the analyses, Davidson urges us to accept the existence of non-recurrent particulars, events, along with that of persons and other objects. The final section employs this ontology of events to provide an anti-reductionist answer to the mind/matter debate that Davidson labels 'anomalous monism'. Events enter causal relations regardless of how we describe them but can, for the sake of different explanatory purposes, be subsumed under mutually irreducible descriptions, claims Davidson. Events qualify as mental if caused and rationalized by reasons, but can be so described only if we subsume them under considerations that are not amenable to codification into strict laws. We abandon those considerations, collectively labelled the 'constitutive ideal of rationality', if we want to explain the physical occurrence of those very same events; in which case we have to describe them as governed by strict laws. The impossibility of intertranslating the two idioms by means of psychophysical laws blocks any analytically reductive relation between them. The mental and the physical would thus disintegrate were it not for causality, which is operative in both realms through a shared ontology of events.