Postdoctoral Fellows

I am a historian of philosophy studying texts from the Early Modern period, especially Spinoza. My dissertation was on Spinoza’s theory of love. I am currently continuing my research of the relationship between knowledge and affectivity, and the question of mind- body unity. I am also interested in the roots of Spinoza’s theory of love, meaning and attachment and its connection to other Western philosophies of love, most notably Plato’s.

Osvaldo Ottaviani’s main interests are in the history of early modern philosophy and science. He received his PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (Italy) in 2018. He studied philosophy at the University of Pisa, and at St. John’s College, Oxford (as a visiting student in 2014-15). After the completion of his PhD, he won a postdoc position at the University of Münster and the Leibniz Forschungsstelle in 2019, and then a postdoc two years fellowship at the University of Milano until Summer 2022. He published papers on Kant’s modal theory and several aspects of the philosophy of Leibniz, including the edition and translation of some of Leibniz’s unpublished manuscripts. He is currently working on the edition and translation of Leibniz’s Writings on the Metaphysics of the Infinite (with Richard T. W. Arthur), forthcoming with Oxford University Press. He is also planning to write a book on Leibniz’s theory of existence and the development of his metaphysics of possible worlds.

Yoav’s field of research is the history and philosophy of science and ideas. In his PhD dissertation heinvestigated the history of the concept of harmony in Europe, starting from the institualization of the science of harmonics in ancient Greece up to the 18th century. At the Technion Yoav’s research will focus on the mathematical and technological achievements of Huygens in the field of time measurement and the influence it had on his student, Leibniz.

I am a mathematical physicist with a focus on foundational and philosophical questions. My main expertise lies in relativistic quantum theory, on which I have also published the book “Local Quantum Measurement and Relativity” (Springer, 2021). I received both my diploma in physics and my PhD in mathematics at the University of Munich (LMU).

My particular research interests are:

Life, foundations of quantum mechanics, foundations of relativity, relativistic quantum theory, quantum nonlocality and relativity, the Dirac Sea picture, the nontrivial vacuum of quantum field theory, localization in quantum field theory, foundations of statistical physics, ontology in physics, Bohmian mechanics, the possibility of mathematical reasoning, the mind-body problem.

קטרינה הנה פוסט-דוקטורנטית במחלקה ללימודים הומניסטיים ואמנויות בטכניון. היא סיימה תואר ראשון B.A. בפילוסופיה של המדעים, ותואר שני M.A. בלימודי שפות באוניברסיטת מילאנו שבאיטליה. במהלך עבודתה כתלמידת מחקר בלימודי הדוקטורט, קטרינה התמקדה בתפקידו של ההומור במופעי סטנד-אפ ככלי לניתוח שפתי – זאת במסגרת תוכנית ADARR  (Discourse Analysis, Argumentation, and Rhetoric) שבאוניברסיטת תל אביב. תפיסת החקר הבינתחומית מהווה עבורה ממד חשוב ומרכזי, ובימים אלה היא עובדת על מחקר מקורי העוסק בניתוח הומור וורבלי בשיח פיזיקת הקוונטים.

I am a philosopher of neuroscience and memory.

I study how the concept of memory plays an explanatory role in neuroscience and how to understand memory’s place in our cognitive architecture.

I am also interested in the connections between learning, skill, and automaticity.

Lotem is a post-doctocal researcher at the Technion’s department of Humanities and Arts. She studied for her PhD at the Loewenstein lab for decision making, in ELSC center for computational neuroscience in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she investigated models of reinforcement learning from neuroscientific, behavioral and philosophical perspectives; She analyzed various suggested models for reinforcement learning and examined how they relate to physical activity in the brain, discovering that the relation between computation and physical activity is not at all straightforward.

Uri Eran is a postdoctoral fellow at the Humanities and Arts Department and a historian of philosophy who specializes in Kant’s ethics and moral psychology. He’s written on Kant’s understanding of feelings and desires and how it is related to contemporary conceptions of emotions. Currently he is working on a Kantian account of self-love as an alternative to the prevalent narcissist understanding of this term. Together with Ohad Nachtomy, Reed Winegar and Noam Hoffer, he is also working on Leibniz’s pre-established harmonies. And he is also interested in the ethics of emerging technologies and in political philosophy.