Dr. des. Kauss, Dominik

Wissenschaftlicher Assistent

Sprechstunde: Nach Vereinbarung per E-Mail

 
 

E-Mail: kauss@em.uni-frankfurt.de
Raum: IG 2.556
Telefon: 069 798-32809
Anschrift:  Norbert Wollheim Platz 1
60629 Frankfurt am Main
                                                                                             

 

Areas of Specialization / Current Research

  • Belief and Credence. I focus on the conceptual and ontological relation between belief and credence, as well as on the respective sets of norms governing their rationality, especially evidential and coherence norms. One question of interest is to what extent these norms are objective/absolute or subjective/relative, another one is to what extent they are context-sensitive. I approach these questions from a theoretical angle that takes certainty as the explanatorily basic notion in epistemology and the ontology of doxastic attitudes.

 

Areas of Competence and Interest

  • Epistemology. Epistemic entitlement; degree of evidential support; default entitlement
  • Propositional Content. Individuation and conceptualization of content; coarse-grained vs. fine-grained accounts; content vs. implicature; modeling content; closure vs. openness of content
  • Philosophical Puzzles. Fitch’s Paradox of Knowability; Russell's Riddle of Nonbeing; Makinson’s Preface Paradox; Kripke’s Dogmatism Paradox; Wright’s Skepticism Paradox
  • Meta-Ontology. The ontological commitments of simple predication, first- and second-order quantification; nominalization, de-nominalization, and their effect on ontological commitment
  • Truth. Realism, Antirealism, Deflationism
  • History of Analytic Philosophy. Frege, Russell, Quine, Prior, Kripke
  • Singular Existentials. Their epistemology, semantics, pragmatics, and metaphysics
  • Conceivability. Notions of conceivability and their inter-relations: believability, imaginability, thinkability; conceivability vs. metaphysical possibility; conceivability and its relation to experience and apriority
  • Philosophy of Logic. Conceptions of logical validity; the significance of the contrast between classical and free first-order logic; first-order modal logic
  • Meta-Semantics. The causal theory of reference; philosophical applications of two-dimensional model theory

 

Papers

  • "A Rational Agent With Our Evidence". Erkenntnis (fc). Accepted Nov 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-022-00653-4
  • "Context-Sensitivity and the Preface Paradox for Credence". Synthese (2021). Accepted Mar 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03115-6
  • "Existence and Believability". Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (forthcoming). Accepted Jan 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/papq.12392
  • "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability". Philosophical Studies 177: 3885-3902 (2020). Accepted Jan 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-020-01413-2
  • "Credence as Doxastic Tendency''. Synthese 197(10): 4495-4518 (2020). Accepted Sep 2018. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-01938-4
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    Reviews

    • "BOB HALE Necessary Beings – An Essay on Ontology, Modality, and the Relations Between Them. Oxford University Press, 2013. x + 298 pp. ISBN 978‐0‐19‐966957‐8 [Book Review]''. Theoria 80(3): 277-282.

     

    Talks

    • "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine (Jun 1, 2019).
    • "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the Work in Progress Seminar, Department of Philosophy, MIT (May 16, 2019).
    • "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the General Meeting of the DFG research group What If, University of Konstanz (May 4, 2018).
    • "Realism and the Logic of Conceivability", delivered at the Logics for Imagination workshop, Ruhr University Bochum (Mar 14, 2018).
    • "Credence as Doxastic Tendency", delivered at Prof. Wolfgang Barz' Colloquium, Goethe University Frankfurt (Dec 18, 2017).
    • "Existence and Believability", delivered at the collective colloquium of the Department of Philosophy, Goethe University Frankfurt (Aug 06, 2016).
    • "Three Takes On Ontological Commitment", delivered at Prof. Stephen Read's colloquium on the Foundations of Logical Consequence, Arché, University of St Andrews (Jun 4, 2012).
    • "Two Deflationist Conceptions of Truth And Their Problems", delivered at Prof. Volker Halbach's colloquium, University of Oxford (Feb 8, 2012).

     

    Teaching

    • Introduction to Logic (Winter 2022/23)
    • Foundations of Bayesian Epistemology (Summer 2022)
    • Decision Theory (Summer 2022)
    • Evidence and Epistemic Rationality (Winter 2021/22)
    • Philosophy of Evidence (Summer 2021)
    • Decision Theory (Summer 2021)
    • Evidence and Context (Winter 2020/21)
    • Decision Theory (Summer 2018)
    • Epistemic Paradoxes, Advanced (Winter 2017/18)
    • Epistemic Paradoxes, Introduction (Winter 2017/18)
    • Belief and Probability (Summer 2017)
    • Philosophy of Propositional Content, Advanced (Summer 2017)
    • Philosophy of Propositional Content, Introduction (Summer 2017)
    • Decision Theory and Game Theory (Winter 2016/17)
    • The Ethics of Belief (Summer 2016)
    • A priori Justification (Winter 2015/16)
    • Analytic Philosophy of Language (Summer 2013)
    • Current Debates in the Analytic Philosophy of Art (Summer 2013)
    • Conceivability and Possibility (Winter 2012/13)
    • Ontological Commitment (Winter 2012/13)
    • Fitch's Paradox of Knowability (Summer 2011)

     

    CV

    2019/Oct - 2020/Aug


    2018/Jul - 2019/Jul


    2010 - 2015


    2012/Jan-Aug




    2003 - 2010
    DFG scholarship holder and post doc visiting fellow at the Eidyn Research Centre, Department of Philosophy, University of Edinburgh (coordination partner: Martin Smith)

    DFG scholarship holder and post doc visiting fellow at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, MIT (coordination partner: Stephen Yablo)

    PhD thesis on Conceivability, Existence, and Logic (Supervisors: André Fuhrmann, Stephen Read)

    DAAD scholarship holder and visiting student at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre for Logic, Language, Metaphysics and Epistemology, St Andrews (Supervisor: Stephen Read) and at the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford (Supervisor: Volker Halbach)

    Study of Philosophy, History-and-Philosophy-of-Science, and Musicology, mostly at the Goethe University Frankfurt, one semester at the Free University of Berlin and one at the University of Marburg. Magister Thesis on Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology and Semantics (Supervisors: André Fuhrmann, Jasper Liptow)