Table of Contents

Welcome to the homepage of the Research Group for Logic in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence (LogPhiAI) at the Institute for Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum.

Note: Currently two postdoc positions are available (→ Call for Applications: PostDoc position, 2 years). The deadline for applications is the 9th of October 2023 resp. the 30th of October.

Description and Impact of the Group

The group has been originally funded under the name Research Group for Non-Monotonic Logic and Formal Argumentation by a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation from September 2014 to September 2019. One research focus of the group is nonmonotonic logic as a formal model of defeasible reasoning. The group actively contributes research in the areas of

  • formal argumentation theory
  • adaptive logic
  • deontic logic, and
  • non-classical logic.

📖 read more

Members and Guests

Current Members

Researchers

Currently the group hosts the following researchers:

  • Christian Straßer (permanent student aka full professor, Wasserstraße 221, office 4/201)

    pass2.png Christian is a professor of Logic in Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence at the Institute for Philosophy II at Ruhr University Bochum. He is specialized in non-monotonic logics, defeasible reasoning, argumentation, deontic and adaptive logics. He is interested in utilizing formal methods (such as logical or computational methods) in philosophy. Beyond logic his research interests spread into the philosophy of science and social epistemology. You find more information on him here.


  • Kees van Berkel (PostDoc, Wasserstraße 221, office 4/403)

    kees.png Kees is a PostDoc in the Reasoning, Rationality & Science group. You find his webpage here. He works on logical methods for normative reasoning. This includes methods from modal logic, nonmotonic logic, proof theory, and formal argumentation. He is working together with Christian on formal explanation of reasoning with normative systems. Kees is furthermore interested in the metaethical principle of `ought implies can’ (both from a philosophical and logical point of view), and the philosophy of practical reasoning.


  • Soong Yoo (PhD student, Wasserstraße 221, office 4/423)

    soong-yoo.jpg Should epistemic workers of the world unite? There are some thoughts or decision we would make only when hanging around with friends, colleagues, and strangers. Same for people doing cognitive tasks for their living. Soong is working with agent-based-models in hope to see how computer simulations would predict and suggest a better conveyor belt of knowledge production.
    Soong is jointly supervised by Dunja and Christian.


  • Sam Sanders (PostDoc researcher)

    Sam-Sanders.jpg Together with Dag Normann, Sam studies the logical and computational properties of the uncountable. Their study of basic mathematical facts pertaining to the Riemann integral or the uncountability of the reals has unveiled a vast new world, often completely different from the state-of-the-art in the countable world, i.e. Reverse Mathematics and Turing computability theory.

  • Prof. Dr. Dr. Cali (Hoomanologist)

    cali.png The –without doubt– most prominent and cheerful member of the group is the Hoomanologist Cali, specialized for Hooman intelligence and well-known for his books “How to train the hooman. The limitations of the hooman mind.” While working in our group he also got interested in logic, see his latest book “My barks don’t lie. Semantic paradoxes as a trademark of Hooman language.” Yes, we can learn a lot from him …

Administration

  • Christiane Dahl (admin, Building GA 04/42)

    letterbox_400__trans_18c974cb771c27d50886ec64e546607f_letterbox_650__trans_74c76e999bc593d614f4b18f45adddd4_foto_cd.jpg Christiane is running the offices of Markus Werning, Kristina Liefke, Sen Cheng, and Christian.





Student Staff

  • Jessica Krumus
    Jessica is a Bachelor student in Philosophy and Biology. She has a special interest in logic and metaphysics. After tutoring for the Logic introductory lecture, she started as a student research assistent for Dunja and Christian.

Previous Student Staff

  • Lisa Michajlova

    lisa.jpg Lisa is now finishing her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics with minor in Philosophy. She currently works as a student assistant with Christian on Probabilistic Argumentation theory. She studies the Probabilistic Framework by Haenni and investigates argument strength defined for example by Pfeifer. Lisa loves playing sports including table tennis and chess.

Previous local PhD students

  • Sanderson Molick (PostDoc, Natal and Bochum)

    s200_sanderson.molick.jpg Sanderson is doing a PhD under the supervision of Joao Marcos and Christian. His current research is focused on critically exploring logical anti-exceptionalism: e.g., the role of the a priori and the question of what is logical data and what roles it plays in logical theory choice. He also investigates problems many-valued logics, in particular in first-order and non-monotonic contexts. He will defend his PhD in April 2021.

  • AnneMarie Borg (Assistent Professor, Utrecht University)

    s200_annemarie.borg.jpg AnneMarie has been working on Justification Logic and Logical Argumentation. Her academic profile can be found here. She finished her PhD under the supervision of Christian and Ofer Arieli in 2019. It contains various contribution to the logical foundations of sequent-based and logical argumentation, such as investigations in extending sequent-based argumentation with defeasible assumptions, or investigations in issues of relevance.

  • Jesse Heyninck (Professor, Open Universiteit Netherlands)

    jesse.jpg Jesse finished his PhD under the supervision of Christian and Ofer Arieli in January 2019. He’s especially interested in combinations of defeasible reasoning forms and argument strength (here’s a description of his research project). His academia homepage can be found here.

  • Matthis Hesse (PhD student, Bochum)

    matthis.jpg Matthis was a PhD student under the supervision of Christian. He holds a degree in Mathematics and a degree in Cognitive Science. He is interested in formal methods to understand cognition. In specific, he aims at understanding how humans reason and argue, how rational and intelligent human reasoning is, how it can be described by formal methods, and eventually how these methods can be implemented in the context of AI. He is convinced that the key to understanding the human mind is to understand when and why it “fails” (measured by classical and rational means).

Associate Members

  • Badran Raddaoui (Associate Professor, Telecom SudParis, Polytechnic Institute of Paris)

    badran.png Badran Raddaoui is an associate professor of computer science at the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. His research interests include reasoning under inconsistency and uncertainty, formal models of argumentation, satisfiability and constraints programming. Further topics that he is interested in concerns the application of symbolic AI techniques for data and graph mining.

  • Dunja Šešelja (Assistant Professor, TU Eindhoven)

    s200_dunja._e_elja.jpg Dunja is working in the philosophy of science. Her research topics include epistemic and methodological aspects of scientific inquiry, with a special emphasis on the context of scientific diversity. Her recent research mainly focuses on agent-based modeling of scientific inquiry and the question of its epistemic function. Find more information on her academic homepage.

  • Daniel Frey (Master Student in Economics at University Heidelberg)

    s200_daniel.frey.jpg Daniel frequently collaborates with us on agent-based models. He is equally interested in the implementation side of things (e.g., NetLogo) and the conceptual considerations underlying formal models. He is finishing his master thesis investigating the Kevin Zollman’s notion of transient diversity.

Previous PostDocs

  • Pere Pardo Ventura (Post-Doc, Milan)
    Pere is working on applications of argumentation and dynamic epistemic logic into defeasible reasoning and deontic logic. A brief CV and list of publications can be found on his homepage https://sites.google.com/site/perepardoventura/home.
  • Jesse Heyninck (Professor, Open Universiteit Netherlands)

    jesse.jpg Jesse finished his PhD under the supervision of Christian and Ofer Arieli in January 2019. He’s especially interested in combinations of defeasible reasoning forms and argument strength (here’s a description of his research project). His academia homepage can be found here.

  • Mathieu Beirlaen

    s200_mathieu.beirlaen.jpg Mathieu was a post-doc in the group. He is working on ampliative reasoning (abduction, inductive generalizations), deontic logic, adaptive logic, and argumentation theory. He is also a funky DJ and You can also listen to his mixes at https://www.mixcloud.com/jimmy_jazz/. He is now working as a business analyst (https://be.linkedin.com/in/mathieu-beirlaen-92a944179).

Previous Guests

  • Badran Raddaoui (Associate Professor, Telecom SudParis, Polytechnic Institute of Paris).

    badran.png Badran spent his sabbatical as a guest in Bochum (Sep. 2022–Sep. 2023). This led to fruitful collaborations on local inconsistency measures (which measure the contribution of a given formula to the inconsistency of a knowledge base) and the relation of inconsistency measures to formal argumentation.


  • Ofer Arieli (Tel Aviv)

    ofer.jpg Ofer visited us for a week in May 2023 during his Sabbatical.


  • Leon van der Torre (Luxembourg) and Reka Markovich (Luxembourg) visited us for a week in March 2023 to work on a paper in legal reasoning.
  • Kees van Berkel (TU Vienna)

    Untitled_klein-180x180.png Kees is a visiting researcher doing a PhD at TU Wien under the supervision of Agata Ciabattoni and Stefan Woltran. His research is centered on logical and argumentative perspectives of normative reasoning. This includes, for instance, the logical study of the principle of `ought-implies-can’ and the development of suitable proof systems for deontic agency logics. His webpage can be found here. At the moment, he is working on argumentative characterizations of deontic reasoning with Christian Straßer. He spent several months in Bochum in the autumn of 2022.


  • Jones Becker Arenhart

    Jonas-Arenhart.jpg Jonas is working on an anti-exceptionalist approach to logic, connecting the ‘logic as models approach’ with current pragmatic oriented understanding of models in philosophy of science. He is also interested in naturalism in philosophy in general. Jones spend his Sabbatical in Bochum.

  • Ofer Arieli (Professor of Computer Science at the School of Computer Science, The Academic College of Tel-Aviv)

    ofer.jpg

Ofer Arieli co-supervised the PhDs of AnneMarie and Jesse. We often collaborate on Sequent-Based Argumentation (see e.g., Sequent-based logical argumentation - IOS Press). Recently a VIP-visiting grant for 2018 was granted to Ofer by the Research School PLUS (RUB).

  • Lorenz Demey (prof. in philosophical logic at KU Leuven)

    lorenz.jpg Lorenz was visiting us from the beginning of July to the end of September 2017. His current research is focused on logical geometry; his other research interests include the philosophies of science, language and mathematics, and the mathematical environment of modal logic (algebra, topology, etc.). His webpages can be found at http://www.lorenzdemey.eu/ and KU Leuven who’s who - Lorenz Demey.

  • Stef Frijters (PhD student, Ghent University)

    stef.jpg

Stef is a PhD student of Joke Meheus, Frederik Van De Putte and Christian. His special interest is in bringing deontic logic closer to real-life applications such as medical ethics. He successfully defend his PhD in March 2021.

  • Vlasta Sikimic (Postdoc, University of Belgrade)

    s200_vlasta.sikimic.jpeg

Vlasta co-organized the conference Formal Models of Scientific Inquiry (link) with us. One of her interests concerns the efficiency of knowledge acquisition in laboratory-based research (e.g., in the Fermilab). Besides that she has published on formal logic (e.g., structurality, display calculi) and animal ethics.

Planned visits

  • Badran Raddaoui (Associate Professor, Telecom SudParis, Polytechnic Institute of Paris). Badran plans to spend a part of his sabbatical as a guest in Bochum,

Connections

Workshops and Conferences

We have organized the following workshops and conferences:

  1. Agent-Based Models in Philosophy – Prospects and Limitations (2019)
    Organized by: Gergor Betz (KIT, Karlsruhe), Dunja Seselja (LMU, Munich), and Christian Straßer (RUB, Bochum)
    Keynotes: Corinna Elsenbroich (Surrey), Rainer Hegselmann (Bayreuth), Cailin O’Conner (Irvine), Samuli Reijula (Tampere), Daniel Singer (University of Pennsylvania), Kevin Zollman (Carnegie Mellon)
  2. Bridging the Gap between Formal Argumentation and Actual Human Reasoning (2018)
    Organized by: Ofer Arieli (Tel Aviv), AnneMarie Borg (RUB), Marcos Cramer (Dresden), Jesse Heyninck (RUB), Pere Pardo Ventura (RUB), Christian Straßer (RUB)
    Keynotes: Ofer Arieli (Tel Aviv), Federico Cerutti (Cardiff), Antonis Kakas (Cyprus), Chris Reed (Dundee), Alice Toniolo (St.-Andrews), Serene Villata (INRIA, Sophia Antipolis), Adam Wyner (Swansea)
  3. Formal Models of Scientific Inquiry (2017)
    Organized by: AnneMarie Borg (RUB), Dunja Seselja (RUB), Vlasta Sikimic (Belgrade), and Christian Straßer (RUB),
    Keynotes: Gregor Betz (KIT, Karlsruhe), Leah Henderson (Groningen), Jason McKenzie Alexander (LSE, London)
  4. Argument Strength (2016)
    Organized by: Mathieu Beirlaen (RUB), AnneMarie Borg (RUB), Jesse Heyninck (RUB), Pere Pardo (RUB), Dunja Seselja (RUB), and Christian Straßer (RUB),
    Keynotes: Gerhard Brewka (Leipzig), Dov Gabbay (London), Gabriele Kern-Isberner (Dortmund), Beishui Liao (Zhejiang), Henry Prakken (Utrecht), Leon Van Der Torre (Luxembourg)
  5. Logic in Bochum (2016)
    Organized by: AnneMarie Borg (RUB), Mathieu Beirlaen (RUB), Jesse Heyninck (RUB), Pere Pardo (RUB), Dunja Seselja (RUB), and Christian Straßer (RUB),
    Keynotes: Joao Marcos (Natal), Gabriella Pigozzi (Paris), Niko Strobach (Münser), Allard Tamminga (Utrecht/Groningen)