ROWBOTTOM Darrell Patrick, Prof.

Prior to my appointment at Lingnan, I was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford. I have also worked at several other universities in the UK, including Aberdeen, Bristol, Durham, and Edinburgh. I started out studying physics, but undertook graduate studies in philosophy and history and philosophy of science. The shift of direction is easily explained: I was fascinated by quantum theory, and what my lecturers (wrongly!) thought that it tells us about the world. I am interested in a wide variety of topics in philosophy of science, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of probability. I also dabble in other areas, including philosophy of education and philosophy of mind, from time to time. I have recently completed a monograph in defence of a new form of instrumentalism about science, The Instrument of Science, which I hope will appear in print next year. My work on this has been supported by a Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship from Hong Kongs Research Grant Council (RGC), and a COFUND Senior International Research Fellowship held at Durham Universitys Institute of Advanced Study. I am now working on a project called Computational Social Epistemology and Scientific Method, which is supported by a General Research Fund grant from Hong Kongs RGC. I am collaborating with Dr. Staffan Angere, who is employed as a postdoctoral researcher on the project. Together, well be developing the programme Laputa and using it to run a variety of simulations of networked inquirers.

Philosophy of Science, Formal and Informal Epistemology (esp. Foundations of Probability), Metaphysics, Philosophy of Education, History of Science, Philosophy of Language, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Physics