University of California, Davis

Graduate Student, Philosophy

About

Bert Baumgaertner is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Davis.  His research focuses on how the computational turn can shed new light on philosophical problems, such as the spread of knowledge, conceptual analysis, and the problem of vagueness (particularly the sorites paradox).  His dissertation, under the direction of Aldo Antonelli and Bernard Molyneux, brings the problem of vagueness, which is traditionally in the domain of philosophy of language, into the domain of philosophy of information and computing.

Bert has been invited to participate as a Summer intern at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, with Professor Matthew Stone on the NSF funded project “Collaborative Reference in Open Domains”.  He has also been given an invited research fellowship for Fall 2010 at the Institute for Logic, Language, and Computation at the University of Amsterdam, under the supervision of Frank Veltman.  Bert is currently a member of the Schank Lab at UC Davis, which investigates the foundations and uses of agent-based models to understand individual and social behaviour.  He is also a member of the Philosophy of Biology Lab at UC Davis.

Apart from philosophy, Bert has a great passion for life.  He enjoys cooking, snowboarding, hiking, and the more subtle pleasures, like the smell of an oncoming thunderstorm, the first snowfall of winter, or the peaty flavour of a good Scotch. 

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