Ilya Kasavin

Humboldt Fellow, short-term hosted at c:o/re (04/23 − 05/23), (12/23)

Ilya Kasavin is Professor and holds the Chair for Philosophy at the Lobatschevski State University of Nizhni Novgorod. He is project director, principal investigator and Department Head (since 2005) at the RAS Institute of Philosophy and Editor in Chief of Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Since 2016 he is the President-Elect of the Russian Society for History and Philosophy of Science. He has been awarded the Georgi Plekhanov Award by Russian Academy of Sciences in 2012. He received funding from the George Soros Foundation, the Humboldt-Stiftung, the Volkswagen Stiftung, the DAAD, the Alfred-Krupp Stiftung, John Templeton Foundation and the Russian Science Foundation.


Science as an ethical project. On the centenary of Paul Feyerabend’s birth

The project proposes a new approach to modern ethics of science inspired by Paul Feyerabend’s ideas. It starts from an analysis of the problem situation and proceeds to select the main sources and types of ethical and scientific discourse, as well as its goals. Special attention is paid to the analysis of methodological controversies of “normativism-descriptivism”, “naturalism-transcendentalism”, “formal-informal”, “a priori-a posteriori”. The project demonstrates the disciplinary underdetermination of science ethics, its mediatory position between normative, descriptive, applied ethics and metaethics. It also traces and reconstructs the responses of science and technology studies, from the humanities and from philosophical ethics to the question of the possibility of scientific ethics.


Publications (selection)

Kasavin, Ilya. 2022. A Social Philosophy of Science. An Introduction. Baden-Baden: NOMOS Verlag.

Kasavin, Ilya. 2020. Science and Public Good: Max Weber’s Ethical Implications. In Social Epistemology. A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, 34(2): 184-196.

Kasavin, Ilya. 2019. Gift versus Trade: On the Culture of Science Communication. In Philosophy of the Social Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1177/0048393119864698 1

Kasavin, Ilya. 2017. The Koiné of Science: Interdisciplinarity and Mediation. In Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 89(6): 543–550.

Kasavin, Ilya. 2003. Soziale Erkenntnistheorie. Migrationsmetaphern, Wissenstypen, Textepochen. Nichtklassische Ansätze. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag.