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Max Goetsch

Max Goetsch

Doctoral Researcher, Freie Universität Berlin

Epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action

My research focus lies primarily in epistemology and everything in its vicinity. More recently, I also got very interested in the nature of action, especially intentional action, and the metaphysics of abilities and modality in general. 
In my dissertation project, these areas intertwine. It aims at a better understanding of relations that, in Ernest Sosa's words, "span mind and world." Two paradigm specimens are knowledge and intentional action. My thesis undertakes a co-elucidation of knowledge and intentional action that not only tries to cotton on to the nature of both on their own but also their relation to one another. I will motivate ability-based accounts of both phenomena that posit that knowledge and intentional action are essentially matters of exercising abilities. This rough thesis will be underpinned by a metaphysics of abilities and their exercise that (hopefully) reveals the explanatory fertility of ability-based accounts. Moreover, my current conjecture is that, if we properly appreciate the nature of abilities and their role in knowledge and intentional action, we can also understand why knowledge is indispensable in a full explanation of intentional agency, on the one hand, and understand knowledge's normative role as the norm of action, belief and assertion.

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Freie Universität Berlin
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, German Research Foundation