Project team
Eva Schmidt (PI)
Eva Schmidt is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at TU Dortmund. She works in epistemology, the philosophy of action, and philosophy of mind. Her main interests are epistemic reasons and reasons for action, explainable artificial intelligence, and the epistemology and nature of perception. Eva Schmidt's book Modest Nonconceptualism: Epistemology, Phenomenology, and Content (2015) defends a nonconceptualist approach to perception. Her current research focuses on questions such as: How can perceptual experience provide epistemic reasons? or: How do reasons and competences relate?
Assaf Weksler (PI)
Assaf Weksler is a philosopher specializing in perception and the cognitive science of perception. He is a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University and a faculty member (Course Coordinator) in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel. He previously held a postdoctoral fellowship in the Psyphas Program for Psychology and Philosophy at the University of Haifa. His primary research interest is bridging the metaphysics of perception with its empirical study.
Ori Beck (PI)
Ori Beck is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He primarily works in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of cognitive science. Before coming to Ben-Gurion, he was a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh.
Quentin Coudray (postdoc)
Quentin Coudray is a postdoctoral researcher at the Open University of Israel. Previously, he completed his Ph.D. in-between the University of Milan and the Institut Jean-Nicod in Paris. He is a philosopher of mind, working principally on the admissible contents of perception, perceptual categorization, nonconceptual representations, or the singular-relational nature of perception.
Daniel Kim (postdoc)
Daniel Kim is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Philosophy at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Prior to that, he was a Humanities Research Centre Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of York, where he also completed his PhD. His research spans the philosophy of mind, philosophy of cognitive science, metaphysics, and phenomenology. His current work explores how analytic and phenomenological approaches can be brought together to better understand conscious experience, with a focus on perception, imagination, and hallucination.
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Alfredo Vernazzani (postdoc)
Alfredo Vernazzani is a Research Fellow at the Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg and a Postdoctoral Researcher at TU Dortmund. He completed his PhD at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he later served as Managing Director of the MSc in Cognitive Science and held a Vertretungsprofessur at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and at Universität Witten-Herdecke. He has held visiting positions at the universities of Cambridge, Harvard, Rutgers, and at Antwerp’s Center for Philosophical Psychology. His main research interests lie in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with a particular focus on perception, the epistemology of understanding in the arts and sciences, and aesthetics.​
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Previous Project Members
Giulia Martina (postdoc)
Giulia Martina is now a Marie SkÅ‚odowska-Curie Senior Research Fellow at the University of Nottingham. Previously, she was a postdoc at the Universities of Salzburg, Turin, Tübingen, and Konstanz. She received her PhD from the University of Warwick in 2020. She is interested in what we perceive, how we perceive it, and how we talk about that. A good chunk of her recent work has focused on olfaction. She has also been working on perceptual variation, illusions, and the metaphysics of perceivable entities.