Pim Klaassen ~ home
Biography
After having obtained both my BA and Research MA in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, I started teaching several courses in philosophy at the UvA. In 2006 I moved to Cambridge (UK), to pursue an MPhil in "History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, Technology and Medicine". My MA dissertation is a Wittgensteinian investigation into folk psychology, with a somewhat exciting detour into a neuroscientific branch of embodied-cognition called neurophenomenology. My MPhil dissertation is a sociological/ philosophical assessment of the process of standardisation in British psychiatry---more specifically: of the process of achieving a standard for the diagnosis and treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). After my return to the Netherlands I have worked for one year as a researcher for the Rathenau Institute, an institute which is to inform the Dutch and European parliaments about the societal meaning and consequences of scientific and technological developments. At present I have a combined research and teaching affiliation at the Philosophy of Science department of the University of Amsterdam.
MA dissertation: Folk psychology. Tacit theory or social practice?
Research interests
Philosophy and sociology of science (particularly the life sciences, including medicine, psychiatry and neuroscience); neuroeconomics; the interface between science, technology, society and politics; "human enhancement"; Foucault; Hacking; Wittgenstein, Fleck...
PhD research
With the establishment of the new science of decision-making called neuroeconomics we are presently witnessing exciting developments on the vanguard of neuroscience and economics. Skeptical, analytical and constructivist questions will be asked in this investigation of how neuroeconomics (a) constitutes its own object(s) of research, (b) reconfigures a new subject of choice and (c) reframes traditional questions central to various scientific disciplines concerned with decision-making (from philosophy to psychology, from neuroscience to economics).