Alan Baker
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy
Swarthmore College
 

Alan Baker is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Swarthmore College, outside Philadelphia and former CABDyN Associate Fellow. His research interests lie at the intersection between philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science, with a particular focus on applied mathematics and what the role of mathematics in science can reveal both about the nature of mathematics and the nature of science. He is also interested in philosophical approaches to understanding complexity and emergence, and on the interplay between prediction and explanation in the context of modelling complex systems.

He was awarded a ‘New Directions’ Fellowship from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to spend the 2008-9 academic year based in Oxford and Warwick pursuing research and study in complexity science.

Selected publications

“Complexity Unfavoured,” Analysis, 68(1), 85-88 (2008)

“Complex Thinking: the Emergence of Everything?”, in The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic and Communication, Volume 2: Complex Cognition and Qualitative Science. ed. J. Skilters, Latvijas Universitate, 137-148 (2007)

“Simplicity,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2004)

“The New Science of Complexity,” in History and Philosophy of Science, ed. H. Lauer, Hope Publications, 373-382 (2003)

“Philosophy and Complexity,” Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Complex Systems (2002)

Homepage

Contact details:
Alan Baker
Department of Philosophy
Papazian Hall 213
Swarthmore College
500 College Avenue
Swarthmore PA 19081-1397
t: 610.328.8426
f: 610.328. 7814
e: abaker1@swarthmore.edu