I am a lecturer (with tenure) at the section for Practical Philosophy at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Before coming here, I have held temporary appointments at various universities including Witten/Herdecke, Glasgow and Regensburg. I teach and do research in ethics, philosophy of the social sciences, and related areas.

 

I co-organised ISUS 2018 at Karlsruhe (with Michael Schefcyzk). The Proceedings are now available in Open Access here.

 

My doctoral dissertation at the London School of Economics was on John Stuart Mill. It most prominently discussed Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures. I defended Mill (and common sense) against some arguably extravagant claims about what a good life would be like.

I have published papers in journals such as The Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy of Science, PLOS ONE, Frontiers of Public Health, The Journal of Value Inquiry and the Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung.

 

 

With Michael Schefczyk I have recently edited three volumes (of six) of the most comprehensive edition of Mill's writings since the Gomperz edition in the 19th century (see Murmann Publishers). One of them includes a new translation of Utilitarianism by myself.

 

My current projects are diverse: In joint work with Michael Schefczyk and Lilly Osburg I am working on detecting Harriet Taylor Mill's contribution to On Liberty using stylometric methods, the paper is out now with Utilitas, here. With a team from the Department of Computer Science at KIT (Klemens Böhm, Martin Schäler and Jens Willkomm, as well as Michael Schefczyk), we are using the Google Books Ngram Corpus to validate claims of conceptual history. With Carsten Schröder of the DIW Berlin I am working on philosophical issues around the Covid-19 pandemic, especially vaccination policy, using SOEP data. The PLOS ONE paper is here.

 

My website at KIT is here