Team > Dr. Marius Backmann

Faculty of Cultural Studies
Professorship for Ethics

I am a postdoctoral lecturer at the University of Bayreuth. I work on philosophy of  time, the problem of induction, metaphysics of science, and free will.

A unifying factor of my work has been a broadly Humean ontology. In that vein, my work on induction focusses on ontologically motivated attempts to solve the Old and the New Riddle. My work on free will explores how a Humean ontology would provide the agent with a certain notion of the power to do otherwise even if determinism might be true. This in turn raises the question whether determinism is really inconsistent with an ontologically open future, and I argue that it is the latter, not determism, which should be the benchmark for whether agents could possibly have the power to do otherwise. Lastly, my work on philosophy of time also explores the connections between temporal ontology and Humean or anti-Humean metaphysics.

I have also recently been working on how to approach a more inclusive and global history of philosophy.

For further information and a list of publications, please visit https://mariusbackmann.net

Teaching

For my courses, please see the P&E intranet.