dr. K.F.J. Salimkhani (Kian)

I am a philosopher of science mainly working on metaphysical, methodological, and foundational questions in physics. My key research areas include the philosophy of spacetime, philosophy of quantum gravity, fundamentality and emergence, and unification in physics. I am also interested in individual obligations in collective harm cases, like the climate crisis and the pandemic. In addition to the Institute for Science in Society, I am part of the new Radboud Centre for Natural Philosophy (RCNP).

Previously, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cologne. In 2023, I acted as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Philosophy and the Sciences at the University of Oslo. I studied physics and philosophy at the University of Bonn, where I also obtained my PhD in philosophy in 2020.

Currently, I'm especially interested in issues of fundamentality in the philosophy of physics but also more broadly. This work is done as part of my DFG project “Fundamentality in Physics and Metaphysics”. The general aim of this project is to bring together perspectives on fundamentality from physics, philosophy of physics and metaphysics in order to investigate the different dimensions of fundamentality in physics and metaphysics, as well as to answer pressing conceptual, ontological and methodological questions at the intersection of philosophy of physics and metaphysics. Specifically, this project aims to shed light on fundamentality in physics and metaphysics with regard to the following research questions: (i) What concepts of fundamentality are used in physics and metaphysics and how are they related? (ii) Are there restrictions on what can be considered fundamental? (iii) What determines the direction of dependency relations? (iv) How can we fruitfully distinguish debates about fundamentality from debates about reality? (v) What is the precise contribution of physics to metaphysics?