Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Affiliated Research Scholars

Martin Kusch (with his daughters)

Martin Kusch

Martin Kusch joined the Department in 1997 and was appointed Professor of Philosophy and Sociology of Science in 2003. He left Cambridge in 2009 to take up a chair in theory of science and epistemology at the University of Vienna.

Research interests

  • philosophy of the social sciences;
  • epistemology (especially social epistemology, testimony, epistemic value, scepticism and relativism);
  • philosophy of language and mind (especially the Wittgensteinian tradition, Kripke, phenomenology, folk psychology);
  • philosophy of natural science and technology (especially reference, natural kinds, rationality, Kuhn and Popper);
  • history of German and Austrian philosophy (especially Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer and Habermas);
  • science and technology studies (especially the sociology of scientific knowledge, science policy and the political philosophy of risk);
  • history of psychology (especially in Germany between 1870 and 1930, debates over the 'heuristics and biases' programme).

Selected publications

  • Einzelheit und Allgemeinheit: Einführung in die Philosophie G.W.F. Hegels, Reports from the Philosophy Department of the University of Jyväskylä (1984)
  • Ymmärtämisen haaste (=The Challenge of Understanding: An Introduction to Hermeneutics, in Finnish), Pohjoinen (1986)
  • (Co-authored with Jaakko Hintikka) Kieli ja maailma (=Language and World, In Finnish), Pohjoinen (1988)
  • Language as Calculus vs. Language as Universal Medium: A Study in Husserl, Heidegger, and Gadamer, Kluwer (1989)
  • Foucault's Strata and Fields: A Study in Archaeological and Genealogical Science Studies, Kluwer (1991)
  • Psychologism: A Case Study in the Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge, Routledge (1995)
  • (Co-authored with H.M. Collins) The Shape of Actions: What Humans and Machines Can Do, MIT Press (1998)
  • Psychological Knowledge: A Social History and Philosophy, Routledge (1999)
  • Knowledge by Agreement: The Programme of Communitarian Epistemology, Oxford University Press (2002)
  • A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules: Defending Kripke's Wittgenstein, Acumen & McGill-Queen's (2006)