Office Hours
Tuesday, Thursday 5:00 - 6:00 pm
In the news
Education
PhD, University of Pittsburgh
About Me
Elay Shech is interested in philosophy of science, physics, mathematics, logic, and biology, and ethics and philosophy of artificial intelligence and machine learning. His books include Idealizations in Physics (Cambridge University Press), which discusses the nature and role of idealization in science, Scientific Understanding and Representation: Modeling in the Physical Sciences (Routledge), and The Metaphysics of Color (Cambridge University Press). Among his papers are “The Mitonuclear Compatibility Species Concept, Intrinsic Essentialism, and Natural Kinds.” Philosophy of Science, 92(1):59-81 (doi.org/10.1017/psa.2024.18), “Bias, Machine Learning, and Conceptual Engineering” Forthcoming at Philosophical Studies, “Machine Understanding and Deep Learning Representation.” Synthese, 201, 51 (doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03999-y), “Historical Inductions Meet the Material Theory.” Philosophy of Science, Volume 86 (December 2019), Issue 5, pp. 918–929 (https://doi.org/10.1086/705524), “Idealizations, Essential Self-Adjointness, and Minimal Model Explanation in the Aharonov-Bohm Effect.” Synthese, Volume 195, 4839–4863 (doi: 10.1007/s11229-017-1428-6), “Two Approaches to Fractional Statistics in the Quantum Hall Effect: Idealizations and the Curious Case of the Anyon” Foundations of Physics, Volume 45, Issue 9: 1063-110 (doi: 10.1007/s10701-015-9899-0), and “What is the ‘Paradox of Phase Transitions?’” Philosophy of Science, 80 (December 2013): 1170–1181 ( doi: 0031-8248/2013/8005-0040).
Research Interests
Ethics and philosophy of AI, philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, philosophy of biology, metaphysics, logic