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Jan Sprenger

Professor (professore ordinario)
Center for Logic, Language and Cognition (LLC)
Department of Philosophy and Education
Università degli Studi di Torino (University of Turin)
Palazzo Nuovo
Via Sant'Ottavio 20
10124 Torino
Italy

Email: jan.sprenger [at] unito.it
Phone: +39-011-091-8213

Portrait Picture


Short Description

I am Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the Department of Philosophy and Education at the University of Turin and affiliated to the interdisciplinary Center for Logic, Language and Cognition (LLC). Actually, I am more of a philosopher of science than a logician, but since moving to Turin, I have worked in formal logic, too. Click here for my CV and here for a description of my research profile.

Before coming to Turin, I worked for almost ten years at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, first as Assistant Professor and then as Full Professor. In the years 2014--17, I directed the research institute TiLPS (2014--17). I obtained my PhD from the University of Bonn for a thesis on the foundations of inductive inference (summa cum laude, 2008) at under the supervision of Professor Andreas Bartels.

In my leisure time, I like to play the piano, to listen to music, to do sports (football, rowing, swimming, running, ...), to cook/to eat, to read, and to meet with friends. I am still a quite reasonable chess player and I sometimes play (duplicate) bridge. I write more about my chess activities here. Since my move to Turin, I am also enthusiastic about hiking in the nearby Alps and I regularly go skiing in winter.

I also love travelling. Above a picture from a hiking trip in Australia (2017). More pictures can be found here.

Research Projects

Currently, I am directing the PRIN project "From Models to Decisions" (2019--2023), funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. It deals with the epistemology of scientific models and the way they support practical decisions. My co--PI's are Gustavo Cevolani, Carlo Martini and Giovanni Valente. Visit the project website!

In September 2021, I was, together with my colleague Vincenzo Crupi, one of the two main local organizers of the EPSA21 Conference.

Until August 2021, I was Principal Investigator of the ERC project Making Scientific Inferences More Objective" funded by the European Research Council (ERC) (2015--2021). Read a short summary here. Visit the project website!

The Book

In 2019, I published my first research monograph, jointly with Stephan Hartmann: Bayesian Philosophy of Science (Oxford University Press). It sums up about 10 years of research that Stephan and I did in philosophy of science using Bayesian methods. If you are interested in the book, there are four main options how you can read it:

  1. Buy it from a bookseller (unfortunately OUP increased prices drastically...).

  2. Convince your university library to buy the book. This is much appreciated by me.

  3. Read online on Oxford Scholarship via your university.

  4. Email me for a pre-final draft, which is not citable, but gives you an idea of the contents.

Useful Stuff for Students

You are a philosophy student and confused about how your thesis should look like? Have a look at at this document (English/Italian). If you are also confused about how to write a philosophy paper, you find a lot of useful resources online, for example here, here and here.

Check out my LaTeX page, too!