Postdoctoral Fellows

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theory and several aspects of the philosophy of Leibniz, including the edition and translation of some of Leibniz’s unpublished manuscripts.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 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.

philosophy studying texts from the Early Modern period, especially Spinoza. My dissertation I am a historian of was on Spinoza’s theory of love. I am currently continuing my research of the relationship between knowledge body unity. I am also interested more -n his theory of mindand affectivity in Spinoza, and focusing on its roots igenerally in Western philosophies of love, most notably Plato’s

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.