My central question is how scientists can support causal claims — for explanation, prediction or control — when the system under study is complex: an economy, a climate, an epidemic, a beehive, the web. A second question is what non-scientific values (ideologies, material interests, moral judgements, in-group preferences) actually do in the sciences, machine learning included.
I also work on the methodology of behavioral welfare economics, on the ethics of welfare policies that target other-regarding preferences, on pragmatic and neo-Kantian accounts of dispositions and structures, on Kant's theoretical and practical philosophy, on Marx's theory of capital, and on Heidegger's Being and Time.
Books
Philosophie der Wissenschaft, Komplexität und KI: eine Einführung (a textbook of about 250 pages, under contract with Springer/Metzler).
Causality and objectivity in macroeconomics. London: Routledge INEM Advances in Economic Methodology, 2023.
Gebrauch oder Herstellung? Heidegger über Eigentlichkeit, Wahrheit und phänomenologische Methode. Paderborn: Mentis, 2010.
Edited collections
Causality in complex systems. European Journal for Philosophy of Science Topical Collection (with James Ladyman), lead guest editor (ongoing).
Minimal (anti-) metaphysics. Synthese Topical Collection (with Andreas Hüttemann), lead guest editor (2025).
Articles and chapters
General philosophy of science
How strong is the argument from inductive risk?, European Journal for Philosophy of Science (2021) (https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-021-00409-x).
Subatomic particles, epistemic stances, and Kantian antinomies, Journal for General Philosophy of Science (2021) (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10838-021-09567-1).
Complexity features, (putative) truisms, and the Ising model (essay review of What Is a Complex System? by James Ladyman and Karoline Wiesner. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), Journal for General Philosophy of Science 52 (2021): 475-482.
Ceteris paribus conditions and the interventionist account of causality, Synthese 192 (2015/10): 3297-3311.
Philosophy of economics
Complexity, causality, and expectations: why macroeconomics needs a program of empirical microfoundations. Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (2026, online first).
Some problems of causal inference in agent-based macroeconomics, Economics & Philosophy (2025).
Causality and probability, in C. Heilmann and J. Reiss (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Economics. London: Routledge (2021), chap. 20.
Response to ‘Response to Henschen: causal pluralism in macroeconomics’, Journal of Economic Methodology 27(2020/3): 263-265.
The logic of scientific discovery in macroeconomics. In M. Addis et al. (eds.), Scientific Discovery in the Social Sciences. Heidelberg: Springer (2019), 103-119.
Book review of Econophysics and Financial Economics: An Emerging Dialogue, by Francke Jovanovic and Christophe Schinckus (Oxford: OUP), Journal of Economic Interaction and Coordination 14 (2019): 425-430.
What is macroeconomic causality?, Journal of Economic Methodology 25 (2018/1): 1-20.
The in-principle inconclusiveness of causal evidence in macroeconomics, European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (2018): 709-733.
History of philosophy
Marx on alienation and employee capital participation, European Journal for the History of Economic Thought 27(2020/2): 230-247.
Kant’s refutation of Hume’s position on causality. In V. L. Waibel et al. (eds.), Akten des XII. Kant-Kongresses. Berlin: de Gruyter (2018): 1485-1494.
Kant on causal laws and powers, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 48 (2014/4), 20-29.
Kant’s Pragmatism, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2013/1): 165-176.
Dreyfus and Haugeland on Heidegger and Authenticity, Human Studies 35 (2012/1): 95-113.
Heideggers Korrektion des göttlichen Worts, Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 51 (2009/3): 289-308.