New winner of Humboldt Research Award chooses LMU

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Philosopher Laurie A. Paul’s research interests include questions surrounding the nature of the self, decision-making, and philosophical methodology. She has received multiple awards for her work. Among her best-known contributions to the field are studies on causality, temporal experience, and in particular her development of the concept of transformative experience and its application to decision theory contexts. In her book Transformative Experience, she argues that the special transformative character of certain new experiences, such as the birth of one’s first child, raises exciting epistemological questions that are directly relevant to many personal life decisions. In addition, she combines key debates from the domains of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology with the question as to what role experience plays in the construction of the self – and does so in a manner that connects contemporary philosophy with the problems of real life.

Laurie A. Paul is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Yale University, with a second appointment at the Department of Psychology there. She also leads the Self and Society Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration funded by the Wu Tsai Institute at Yale University.

At LMU, Laurie A. Paul will be the guest of Prof. Stephan Hartmann, Chair of Philosophy of Science and one of the directors of the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). During her stay in Munich, she plans to work on a project that investigates the metaphysical structure of the self and subjective experience from an empirically informed standpoint. “This project is directly related to various research being undertaken at MCMP and other projects at the Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Studies,” says Hartmann, “which will make for productive collaboration with Professor Paul.”