Alexander Afriat

Alexander was born in Indiana, in fact on the banks of the Wabash, which makes him one of the world’s few genuine Hoosiers. But he soon left the country and headed first to the frozen North, in due course to the banks of the Isis, the Seine, the Cam, the Thames, etc. and only made it back to America in 2004, during his first semester as Visiting Fellow. He’s now back in Urbino, where there’s no river, the truffles are unusually good, the Duke’s profile is everywhere, and he teaches things like philosophy of physics, Hume, history of science, Duhem, methodology of natural science. Alexander somehow got to the foundations of physics from classics: he began with a rather general BA­—with courses in Greek literature & philosophy, mathematics, and Italian literature (from Dante to Tasso)­—at McGill, then went to Paris (IV Sorbonne), did a Maîtrise in Lettres classiques (Greek, Latin, French) with a thesis on Aristotle, and got interested in history and philosophy of science. Then an M Phil in HPS at Cambridge, and a Ph.D. on the philosophy of quantum mechanics at the London School of Economics. Alexander is currently working on philosophy of space and time.