Curriculum Vitae

Areas of Specialization: Political Philosophy, Social Epistemology, Normative Political Economy

Areas of Competence: Philosophy of Economics, AI Ethics, Medieval Philosophy

Academic positions

April 2025–December 2025
University of Hamburg
Interim Professorship (“Vertretungsprofessur”) Political Philosophy (W2)
2021–2027
University of Hamburg
Junior Research Group Leader for the project “Culpable Ignorance – Moral Knowledge in Organizations”, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (1 postdoc, 2 PhD students)
(includes 6 months parental leave)
2017–2020
University of York
Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow for the project “Where Credit is Due: The credit system from the perspective of global justice”
2013–2016
University of Cambridge
Philosophy tutor for several colleges and guest lecturer
2011–2013
University of Oxford
Philosophy tutor for several colleges
2008–2010
University of Bayreuth
Tutor

Education

2015–2018
University of Groningen
Ph.D. Economics
2013–2017
University of Cambridge
Ph.D. Philosophy
2015
Harvard University
Visiting Scholar
2010–2013
University of Oxford
B.Phil Philosophy (two-year Master’s)
2006–2010
University of Bayreuth
B.A. Philosophy & Economics, and
B.A. European History

Funding

External third-party funding ≈ €1.2m; Institutional = €63.000

External competitive funding
  • Volkswagen Foundation — Freigeist Fellowship (PI), 2021–2027: €920,000 — Culpable Ignorance – Moral Knowledge in Organizations.
  • DFG — Scientific Network (PI), 2024–2027: €95,000 — Just Housing in Europe Network.
  • Leverhulme Trust — Early Career Research Fellowship (PI), 2017–2020: £120,000 (salary match + research funding).
  • York–Maastricht Partnership — Ethical Debt Network (Co-I), 2019–2022: £16,000 (with Janosch Prinz).
  • British Academy — Future of the Corporation (Co-I), 2018: £30,000 (with Nien-hê Hsieh & David Rodin).
  • INETConference grant (Organizer-PI), 2016: $5,000 — Finance and Social Justice Conference at the University of Bayreuth.
Institutional competitive funding
  • Indiana-Hamburg Seed Funding Programme (Co-PI), 2026: €8,000 — Social Experiments in Agentic Markets: Procedural Justification and Moral Learning among Artificial Agents (with Matthew Adams).
  • University of Hamburg — IRF Ideas & Risk Fund (Organizer-PI), 2023: €29,000 — Just Housing in Europe Conference (international conference).
  • University of Hamburg — Visiting researcher support (Host), 2023: €2,000 — Two international research stays (May–June 2023).
  • Groningen Law Department — Research grant (PI), 2016: €20,000 — Intellectual Virtue Scale (data collection).
  • University of Bayreuth — Conference grant (Organizer-PI), 2023: €12,000 — Finance and Social Justice Conference at the University of Bayreuth.

Scholarships and Awards

Best Practical Solutions Award 2025, Society for Business Ethics, for the paper “How Business Ethics Consultants Drive Ethical Change”, with Tong Li.

Best Dissertation Award 2017, Society for Business Ethics, for my dissertation on the “Right to Credit”.

Scholarship for the philosophy and economics Ph.D. dissertations in ”The Trusting Banks Project”, financed by the NWO (Dutch Research Organisation), 2013-2017.

Sloane Robinson Award, Lincoln College, Oxford, 2012–2013.

Scholarship of the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), 2011–2012.

Scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation, 2007–2012.

Recent Presentations

54 presentations since 2015, full list available on request
(*) Invited

(*) “The Role of Epistemic Vice for Organizational Misconduct.”, University of Cologne, April 2026.

(*) “Autonomy at Work in the Age of AI”, University of Graz, March 2026.

(*) “The Epistemic Turn in Organizational Ethics: Virtues, Vices, and Epistemic Infrastructure”, Hoffmann Center for Business Ethics, University of Bentley, March 2026.

(*) “An Interactionist Account of Collective Epistemic Virtue”, Collective Ethics Seminar, University of Vienna, November 2025

“Challenging Incumbency Bias in Housing Policy”, Conference by the Society for Analytical Philosophy Germany (GAP), September 2025.

“How Should Lenders Explain Credit Decisions?”, PPE Society Conference King’s College London, July 2025.

(*) “AI’s Impact on Belief Revision and Human Epistemic Agency”, Institute for Ethics in Technology, Technical University Hamburg, June 2025.

“Incumbency Bias in Housing Policy“, PPE Conference, Tulane University, New Orleans, November 2024.

(*) “Epistemische Tugenden und Laster in der Organisationsethik”, Universität Bremen, November 2024.

(*) “Der Markt und das Laster”, „Tagung Der Markt und die Tugenden“, Kiel Center for Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Kiel, October 2024.

(*) “Institutional Epistemic Virtue in the Technological Age: Lessons from the IMF and World Bank's Forecasting Practices”, Workshop on Political Virtues in the Age of Technology at Technion University, June 2024.

“The Epistemic Vices of Corporations”, Institutional Epistemology Conference 2023, University of Helsinki, June 2023.

(*) “Epistemic vice and culpable ignorance in organizations”, 2023 Intellectual Humility Conference in Florence, Macquarie and NYC, May 2023.
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Teaching and Supervision

PhD Supervision
2022–ongoing
Lily Tappe (primary supervisor), University of Hamburg. Working title of the Dissertation: Collective Culpable Ignorance. An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Blameworthiness and Responsibility for Epistemic Vice and Doxastic Failings in Organisations
2025–ongoing
Till Micke (primary supervisor). Working title: “Epistemology for Organisations - on the Role of Knowledge and Information in Organisations”
2021–2023
Braden Campbell (Member of dissertation committee), The City University of New York. Title: Epistemic Virtue and Receptivity to Science in Policing
Teaching

University of Hamburg

Winter 2025
Lecture: Introduction to Political Philosophy (DE)
Winter 2025
Seminar: Issues in the Ethics and Epistemology of Artificial Intelligence (EN)
Summer 2025
Lecture: Introduction to Ethics (DE)
Summer 2025
Seminar: Interdisciplinary Seminar in Philosophy and Economics: Capital (EN)
Summer 2025
Seminar: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (DE)
Summer 2025
Seminar: Epistemic Bubbles and Echo Chambers: The Ethics of Polarized Knowledge Environments (EN)

Supervision: First supervisor of one MA thesis and 2 BA theses, second supervisor of 3 BA theses.

University of Bayreuth

Seminars for undergraduate and master students (two lecture hours/week delivered as ‘block seminars’ for advanced BA and MA students in Philosophy & Economics as well as BA Economics students), most seminars co-taught:

Winter 2022
Paradigms, policies and power (EN)
Summer 2022
Epistemic Virtue for Organizations (EN)
Winter 2021
The Philosophy, Sociology and Economics of Class (EN)
Summer 2021
The Ethics of Capitalism (EN)
Winter 2020
Debt, inflation and employment after the pandemic (EN)
Summer 2020
Designing policies for a just climate transition (EN)
Winter 2019
The Future of Capitalism (EN)
Summer 2019
Big Corporations and Social Justice (EN)
Winter 2018
The Political Economy of the Eurozone (EN)
Summer 2018
Capital, Finance, and Justice: Political Philosophy after Piketty (EN)
Winter 2017
What to Believe Now? Applied Epistemology, Information Markets, Networks
(EN)
Summer 2017
The Ethics and Governance of Algorithmic Decision Making (EN)
Winter 2016
Finance and Social Justice (EN)
Summer 2016
The Efficient Market Hypothesis (EN)
Winter 2015
The Complexity Science Approach to the Financial System (EN)
Summer 2015
Debt and Democracy (EN)
Winter 2014
Achieving Financial Stability (EN)
Winter 2013
Risk in Finance (EN)
Summer 2012
The Philosophy and Economics of Sovereign Debt Crises (EN)

Supervision: Primary supervisor of one MA thesis.

Universities of Oxford and Cambridge

12 Supervisions (weekly one-on-one tutorials for the duration of a trimester) for various Oxford and Cambridge colleges on ethics, political philosophy, medieval philosophy, and early modern philosophy (all years).

2 lecture sessions on moral philosophy for the MBA and the EMBA programme at Judge Business School, Cambridge

Teaching Certificate for Higher Education for the UK (according to UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and learning support in higher education). Modules on teaching practice, student learning, course evaluation, assessment and feedback, lecturing, and course design.

Academic Service and Administration

2023–ongoing
Representative of Mid-Level Academic Staff in the philosophy faculty of the University of Hamburg
2023–ongoing
Reviewer for proposals of the Ideas and Risk Fund (IRF) at the University of Hamburg
2014–2022
Designed and led the Finance & Philosophy module at the University of Bayreuth, including curriculum design, as well as organization of two lecture series with external speakers from economics and philosophy on “Achieving Financial Stability” and “Debt and Democracy”
2021
Developed course material for a three-day course on tech ethics for Logical Operations, a courseware provider, for participants to earn the Certified Ethical Emerging Technologist Certificate – the first comprehensive certificate on tech ethics for practitioners, launched May 2021 (with Linda Eggert, Wessel Reijers, and Ted Lechterman)
2018
Administered two workstreams in British Academy programme “The Future of the Corporation”. Project lead researchers Nien-hê Hsieh and David Rodin

Conferences and Workshops Organized

2023–
Organized three international interdisciplinary workshops on “Just Housing in Europe” https://sites.google.com/view/justhousingineurope/
May 2023
Organized the international interdisciplinary conference “The Role of Knowledge for Responsible Decision Making in Organizations” at the University of Hamburg
2020–2021
Organized three remote interdisciplinary workshops on the “Ethics of Debt” for the Ethics of Debt Network, May 2020, February 2021, July 2021 (with Janosch Prinz)
October 2019
Organized an interdisciplinary one-day workshop on “The Future of Capitalism”, European University Institute, October 2019
December 2018
Organized an interdisciplinary one-day workshop on “Normative and Conceptual Issues in the Economy”, University of York
May 2018
Organized British Academy Research Conference on “Social Purpose and Culture of Corporations” (one day international conference at the British Academy)
November 2016
Organized the Finance and Social Justice Conference at the University of Bayreuth, November 2016 (two-day international conference)
May 2015
Organized a graduate workshop on the ethics of sovereign debt, University of Cambridge (with Jens van’t Klooster)

Editorial and Peer Review Roles

2026–ongoing
Member of the Journal of Business Ethics Editorial Board
2023–ongoing
Member of the editorial team for the Journal Topoi

Referee for the Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Philosophy, American Political Science Review, Nous, Journal of Business Ethics, Business Ethics Quarterly, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Politics, Philosophy and Economics, Political Review Quarterly, Social Epistemology, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, AI and Ethics, Res Publica, Review of Social Economy, Political Research Quarterly, Philosophy & Technology, Ethics and Information Technology, Ergo, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Business and Professional Ethics Journal, Journal of Social Ontology, Journal of Value Inquiry, International Theory, Philosophical Psychology, Journal of Banking and Finance, Oxford University Press, Routledge, Springer.

Media and Outreach

My research has been featured in international media including Financial Times, Die Zeit, Tagesschau24, The Telegraph, Die Presse, Svenska Dagbladet, El Confidencial, Die Welt, BILD, TAZ.

I co-developed the “Conspiracy Generator” with Maarten Boudry, an educational tool using AI to demonstrate how conspiracy theories can be generated based on any piece of news, and how (https://conspiracy-generation.streamlit.app).

I advise various companies, including Google, on organizational ethics and responsible innovation. I advise the Police Academy North Rhine Westphalia (HSPV NRW) in a four-year project on knowledge culture.

I advise for and have presented my research to policymakers and NGOs such as De Nederlandsche Bank, New Economics Foundation, The New Institute, Bundesverband der Versicherungsberater, GLS Bank, Financial Planning Standards Board Deutschland e.V.

I initiated and led the project “Twelve Stars”, starting a debate between citizens and 27 practical philosophers from all over Europe to discuss proposals for the future of the European Union, issuing in an edited volume with accessible essays by philosophers in English and German published in March 2019. Sold more than 2,000 copies. www.twelvestars.eu.

Languages

German, English, French.