  Anouk
Barberousse is a Research Fellow (tenured position) in
philosophy of science at the IHPST (Institut d'Histoire et de
Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques), in Paris, France. After
a PhD thesis on the philosophical problems raised by statistical
mechanics, she has been a lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure
(Paris). Her current research interests lie in the epistemic uses of
scientific pictures (from diagrams to photographs), especially
within models in physics and biology, and in the epistemology of
complex systems and computer simulations. For more information, see
her homepage.
 Alexander
Bird occupies the institutional chair of philosophy at the
University of Bristol. Earlier in his career he read PPE at St
John's College, Oxford (1983-86), having switched from Physics and
Philosophy on finding that the latter interfered with his rowing
career. A year at the University of Munich was followed by four
years at Cambridge (1987-91), first at St Edmund's College, then at
King's. He completed an MPhil and a PhD in History and Philosophy of
Science, the latter with a thesis arguing for neo-logicism in the
philosophy of mathematics. He then spent two years in the Civil
Service, working on aspects of the Single European Market and the
Common Agricultural Policy. He returned to academia in 1993, with a
temporary and then a permanent post at Edinburgh University, in due
course becoming Reader and Head of Department. He has also taught at
Dartmouth College, and at the Universities of Caen and Siena.
Alexander is now trying to prove that the laws of nature are
necessary, that natural properties are essentially dispositional,
that theories are not radically underdetermined by evidence, and
that scientific progress is the accumulation of scientific
knowledge. His research also includes questions concerning the
theory-dependence of observation and a naturalistic development of
the work of Thomas Kuhn in the light of advances in cognitive
science. He is the author of Philosophy of Science (Routledge 1998)
and Thomas Kuhn (Acumen 2000) and numerous papers in philosophy of
science, metaphysics, and epistemology. For more information, see
his
homepage.
 Luc Bovens
graduated from the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis in 1990 with a Ph.D. in Philosophy. Since then he has been teaching
in the University of Colorado at Boulder. Last Fall, he received a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award from the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation which provides funding for a research group entitled 'Philosophy, Probability and Modeling' in the University of
Konstanz, Germany from 2002-5. He is currently engaged in a joint project supported by a grant from NSF (Science and Technology
Studies) on Bayesian Networks in philosophy of science and epistemology and in a joint project on probabilistic modeling and
social choice. For more information, see his homepage.
Fabien Chareix is maître de conférences at the University of
Paris IV- Sorbonne. He achieved is PhD at the University of Paris X
in late1999. His main research field deals with classical science,
philosophy and history of seventeenth century natural philosophy. He
published a book on Galileo in 2002 (Le mythe Galilée, Paris: PUF)
and his PhD dissertation will be available soon (Entre Galilée,
Descartes et Newton: La philosophie naturelle de Christiaan Huygens,
Paris:Vrin). But he has also extended his research objects to a
wider approach of physics, both in historical and physical aspects.
He plans to organize in 2005 a meeting dedicated to the
philosophical reception of Einstein's Relativity. For more
information see his homepage.
 Jacques Dubucs
studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Saint-Cloud and graduated
from the University Paris-V with a Ph.D. in logic. He was an
Assistant Professor in Mathematics at the Ecole Normale Superieure
in Rabat (Morocco) from 1980 to 1985, while he got his Doctorat
d'Etat on Proof Theory in 1984 from the University Paris I. Since
then he has been a CNRS researcher at the Institut d'Histoire et de
Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (IHPST). Since 2002, he
is the Director of this institute. His main interests focus on
philosophy of mathematics, logical modelling and probabilistic
reasoning. For more information see his
homepage.
 Pascal Engel
is professor of philosophy of logic, language and knowledge at the
University of Paris IV Sorbonne. His publications range from the
philosophy of logic to the philosophy of mind and epistemology. In
English he is the author of The Norm of Truth ( Harvester 1991),
Truth (Acumen, 2002), Ramsey ,Truth and Success (with Jerome Dokic,
Routledge 2002) and the editor of Inquiries into Meaning and Truth
(Harvester 1991, with N. Cooper) and of Believing and Accepting (Kluwer,
2000). For more information, see his
homepage.
Stephan Hartmann
studied Physics and Philosophy at the Universities of Giessen, Seattle,
Konstanz and Munich and graduated from the University of Giessen in 1995
with a Ph.D. in Philosophy. From 1998 till 2003, he was an Assistant
Professor at the University of Konstanz and, in the academic year 2000/2001,
he was a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the
University of Pittsburgh. In 2003 he started to teach in the Department of
Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the London School of Economics
(LSE). In 2004 he became the Director of the Centre for Philosophy of
Natural and Social Science at the LSE. He also directs the Research group
"Philosophy, Probability and Modeling" in the University of Konstanz (with
Luc Bovens, since 2002). He works on the application of formal methods (such
as probabilistic modeling techniques) to problems of philosophical interest
(from epistemology, philosophy of science, and social choice theory). In
this context, he recently published Bayesian Epistemology (OUP 2004)
with Luc Bovens. He also works in the foundations of physics (quantum field
theory, probability in quantum mechanics) and on problems from general
philosophy of science (models in science, theory change). For more
information, see his
homepage.
Philippe Mongin studied philosophy, economics and mathematics at
the Ecole Normale Superieure and graduated from the Ecole des Hautes-Etudes
en Sciences Sociales with a Ph.D. in 1978. After teaching at various
universities in France and abroad he became Directeur de recherche
de 1ère classe au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
section des sciences de l'économie et de la gestion at the Ecole
Polytechnique in 1994. His research is mainly concerned with the
philosophy of economics, the theory of rational choice, and
epistemic logic. For more information see his homepage. <link to >
 Léna Soler
studied Physics in Orsay from 1987 to 1990 and philosophy in Paris
from 1990 to 1997 at the Sorbonne. She graduated in 1997 with a Ph.
D. in history and philosophy of science with a work on the
development of Einstein’s thinking between 1905 and 1926. Since 1998
she holds the position of a Maître de Conférences at the IUFM de
Lorraine in Nancy. She is also a member of the Poincaré Archives (UMR
7117 of the CNRS, Nancy) and an associate member of the IHPST (UMR
8590 of the CNRS) in Paris. She works on synchronic and diachronic
aspects of the problem of theory-change in science. At the
synchronic level, the aim is, on the one hand to achieve a
fine-grained characterization of the theoretical (linguistic and
practical) differences existing between what is commonly called
“incommensurable frameworks”, and on the other hand to provide an
understanding of the kind of continuity that is always involved in
revolutionary transitions. At the diachronic level, the purpose is
to explain scientific bifurcations, to identify and classify the
kind of elements that constraint individual and collective
scientific decisions in actual particular cases, and to discuss the
possibility and the fruitfulness of giving a general interpretative
account of the reasons of scientific decisions.
 John Worrall
obtained his PhD from the LSE in 1971 as a student of Imre Lakatos's.
Now a Professor of Philosophy of Science at LSE his current
interests include theory-change in science, the issue of scientific
realism, and methodology and medicine (especially the methodology of
randomized clinical trials and its relationship to causal
inference). A former editor of The British Journal for the
Philosophy of Science, he was also co-editor of Lakatos's Proofs and
Refutations and of his 2-volume Philosophical Papers. He is the
author of a number of influential articles on structural realism and
theory-confirmation and is currently completing a book entitled
Reason in Revolution: A Study of Theory-Change in Science.
 Hervé Zwirn
is Directeur de Recherche associé au CNRS at CMLA (ENS Cachan) and
associate researcher at IHPST. He holds a PhD in quantum physics and
has been publishing many papers on interpretation of quantum
mechanics. He has also been involved in formal axiomatizations of
the notion of confirmation. In this context, he proved that it is
impossible to find a confirmation criterion in a classical
probabilistic framework. Moreover, he has developed an
axiomatization of abductive inference that is a subject of interest
both in epistemology and in artificial intelligence. He recently
proposed to use the formalism of Hilbert spaces to model the
preferences of agents in decision theory instead of the usual
Bayesian framework. Zwirn is the organizer of a seminar on
Complexity at IHPST and CMLA since 2002. He is a member of the
direction comity of the ACI "Complexité" of CNRS since 2003. In
2002, he published "Les limites de la connaissance" (Odile Jacob
ed), a book that won the prize Lequeux of the Institute of France in
2002.
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