Anjan Chakravartty

Anjan Chakravartty is a Professor of Philosophy and History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Notre Dame. He received his BSc in Biophysics and MA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto before completing his MPhil and PhD at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the nature of scientific knowledge – the metaphysics and epistemology of the sciences – as well as scientific modeling and representation and the consequences of these practices for concepts such as knowledge and truth, especially in connection with physics and biology. He is currently researching the nature of scientific disagreement.

Chakravartty serves as the Director of the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at Notre Dame, as well as the Editor in Chief of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Previously he served as the Director of the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His first book, A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable (Cambridge University Press) won the Canadian Philosophical Association’s Biennial Book Prize, and his latest book is Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology (Oxford University Press).

As a Guggenheim Fellow, Chakravartty will explore how people should think about science in the face of disagreement among experts, how experts who find themselves in such disagreements should proceed, and the repercussions of these challenges for how we should think about making policy on the basis of our best science.