About Me
I am a postdoctoral researcher in the AUSAD project at the Universitat de València and a member of the València Philosophy Lab.
My research lies at the intersection of philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of medicine and psychiatry, and metaphysics. I work primarily on proper functions, dispositions and abilities, and the conceptual foundations of health and mental disorder.
My current research develops a role-based theory of proper functions across life, mind, and medicine. I also develop the Blueprint View of health and mental health and investigate how functions can ground representation, error, and dysfunction in biological and artificial systems.
Before coming to València I worked on two research projects in the Philosophy Department of Bielefeld University that focused on teleosemantics and the metaphysics of biological dispositions.
Acknowledgements
Academic work is often presented as an individual achievement, although it depends on many forms of intellectual, practical, and personal support. I am grateful to the colleagues, collaborators, friends, and family members who have contributed to and supported my work. I am especially grateful to Maria-Theresa Hundertmark, whose support over many years made much of the work represented here possible.
Upcoming
-
2026-08-24
Grounding Representational Content in Artificial Neural Networks
A symposium at the ECAP12 from 24 to 28 August 2026 in Madrid Recent work in the philosophy of mind and artificial intelligence (AI) asks whether the internal states of artificial neural networks, especially large language models (LLMs), can have representational content and, if so, what facts make this possible. This symposium brings together four…
-
2026-08-24
Proper Functions as an Etiological Kind: Core and Modules
With Marc Artiga at the ECAP12 from 24 to 28 August 2026 in Madrid Proper functions are used to explain why some hearts malfunction, why some neural states misrepresent, and why certain psychological and physiological conditions are considered disorders. We treat the question “What is it for something to have a specific proper function?” as…
-
2026-08-24
AI Frogs, Proper Functions, and Internal Representations
with James Turner12th European Congress of Analytic Philosophy, Madrid, 24–28 August 2026 Modern AI systems built on artificial neural networks (ANNs) display behaviours that, in animals, would typically be explained by appeal to internal representations. This has prompted debate over whether such systems could possess internal representation. We advance this discussion by applying a teleosemantic…