After studies in philosophy, history, and political science at the University of Göttingen and the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), I obtained my PhD in 2007 from Marburg University. Before joining ICREA in 2014, I held positions at Marburg (1995-2000); UCSD (2000), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences & Humanities (2001-2005), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2005-2009), and the Dept. of Philosophy, UAB (Ramón y Cajal Scholar, 2009-2014). I am also a member of the IHC (UAB), the LOGOS group (UB), the Kant-edition at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences & Humanities, and Associate Research Fellow at the Wundt Center for Philosophy & History of Psychology, Universidade Federal Juiz de Fora (Brazil). From 2019-2021, I was Head of the Kantian Rationality Lab at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University, Kaliningrad - a project which I quit because of the war on Ukraine. In 2019, I became elected member of the Academia Europea.

How is rationality understood in philosophy and the sciences? How should it be understood? What is its function in various domains? These are the guiding questions for my research, which comprises topics reaching from early modern philosophy – esp. Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – up to current discussions at the interface of philosophy, psychology, and the social sciences. I study aspects of Kant’s account of reason and his contributions to the natural and the human sciences. I analyze the history, the potentials, and the limits of current empirical and philosophical theories of rationality. I have more recently turned to the role of these theories in politics, ethics, and education. Methodologically, I combine tools of analytic philosophy, cognitive science, and history of science: I am unconvinced that they cannot, or should not, be integrated.