Eugen Fischer

Eugen Fischer is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia (UEA), Norwich, UK. He works in experimental philosophy and the philosophy of philosophy, practiced as a branch of applied philosophy of science. He has originated the research program of experimental argument analysis that adapts psycholinguistic methods to study verbal reasoning. His current work, in experimental philosophy of philosophy, explores the use of empirically gained self-insight as philosophical tool: it explores how empirical insights into processes involved in philosophical cognition help address philosophical problems. His experimental work examines belief fragmentation and the role of stereotypes and metaphors in natural language reasoning. His theoretical work studies their role in generating philosophical problems about visual perception.

He holds a BPhil and a DPhil (elsewhere known as ‘Ph.D.’) from Oxford and has taught at the Universities of Oxford and Munich, before coming to UEA. He has held a Golestan Fellowship at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, a Senior Research Fellowship at the Central European Institute of Advanced Study / Collegium Budapest, and a Heisenberg Fellowship from the German Research Council. He is a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.

He is the author of Linguistic Creativity (2000) and Philosophical Delusion and its Therapy (2011), has co-edited several volumes, including Experimental Philosophy, Rationalism, and Naturalism (2015) and Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy (2019), and has published in journals including Cognition, Synthese, and Mind and Language.

Contact: E.Fischer@uea.ac.uk