Stephan Hartmann is regarded as one of the leading scholars in the fields of formal epistemology and philosophy of science, and he became a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at LMU last October. Later today (8 May, 2013), at a ceremony in Berlin, Hartmann will officially receive Germany’s most generously endowed prize for distinguished contributions to research, the Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, that brought him back to the land of his birth.

Hartmann now holds the Chair of Philosophy of Science at LMU‘s Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) and, together with his colleague Hannes Leitgeb, who occupies the Chair of Logic and Philosophy of Language and also holds a Humboldt Professorship, he is actively engaged in extending the interdisciplinary reach of his subject in often surprising directions. The basic goal of the MCMP is to apply advanced mathematical methods to a range of complex philosophical problems.

Born in 1968, Hartmann studied Philosophy and Physics, and has held professorships at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and, prior to his move to LMU, at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, where he served as Founding Director of the Tilburg Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science. Hartmann is the fourth Humboldt Professor at LMU. The honor had previously been accorded to systems biologist Ulrike Gaul, astrophysicist Georgi Dvali and Hannes Leitgeb. The prestigious awards, administered by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and financed by the Federal Ministry for Research, are intended to enable internationally recognized scholars and scientists to carry out long-term, groundbreaking projects at research institutions and universities in Germany.

(LMU press release, Munich, 8 May 2013)