Olivier Sartenaer

Presentation

As an FNRS research fellow and after obtaining a master degree in both physics and philosophy, Olivier Sartenaer received his PhD thesis in philosophy in 2013 at UCLouvain. His dissertation, which involved research at the University of Cambridge and Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University, was awarded with the triennial « Dopp Prize » of the Higher Institute of Philosophy. After several postdoctoral stays (at Columbia University as a Fulbright/BAEF/Franqui fellow, at UCLouvain (and the University of Virginia) as a FNRS postdoctoral researcher, and at the University of Cologne as a von Humboldt fellow), he obtained in 2019 the biennial ISDT Wernaers grant in science communication and founded the outreach project Doubt my Sciences (funded by Innoviris). He became lecturer in philosophy of science at UNamur’s SPS departement in the Faculty of Science in 2022.

Olivier Sartenaer’s research is located in the field of philosophy of science, and mostly addresses the topics of emergence and reductionism within the natural sciences from both an epistemological and metaphysical perspective. In particular, Olivier Sartenaer’s recently participated in framing a new understanding of emergence —called « transformational emergence »— which allows for making sense of some canonical emergence ascriptions within physics (e.g. in specific phase transitions). Since 2019, he is also interested in the place and role of the scientific discourse in broader society, with a focus on the demarcation between « genuine science » and so-called pseudosciences. He is also interested in the cross-fertilization between epistemology and science education/scientific literacy.

Contact: Olivier Sartenaer

Research | MIS project Re-engineering Non-reductive Physicalism for the 21st Century

When the founding fathers of emergentism devised the concept of emergence in the early 20th century, they aimed at laying the groundwork of a new philosophy of nature that was supposed to constitute a middle course between reductive physicalism and substance dualism. From the outset, emergence was given an ontological guise. It was put at the service of an overall view of the natural world that contains things which, though ultimately dependent on a common physical basis, are also genuinely distinct from it.

As soon as the 1930s, emergentism fell into disrepute, given some insuperable metaphysical and empirical issues. As of today, despite the fact that emergentism has re-emerged as a live option, none of the available accounts of the notion manages to meet the initial standards of the view. Debates have reached a deadlock, the desired middle course appearing more and more as an elusive fantasy.

The main objective of Olivier Sartenaer’s MIS project is to break this deadlock, by capitalizing on a recent and original theory of emergence called “transformational emergence”, which constitutes a way to overcome the issues that plagued early emergentism and still plague its contemporary descendance. More particularly, the project intends to develop an account of transformational emergence that constitutes the appropriate tool to vindicate an ontological form of non-reductive physicalism.

In this spirit, three specific goals will be pursued. First, the missing history of transformational emergence - rendered invisible by a powerful historical bias - will be written. Second, transformational emergentism will be given robust metaphysical underpinnings along its three defining dimensions that are diachrony, flatness and “ontological oomph”. And third, transformational emergentism will be provided with empirical respectability, by showing that it constitutes the best interpretative framework for natural phenomena that pertains to certain areas of physics (viz. early universe cosmology) and biology (viz. major evolutionary transitions theory).

Mentor | Prof. Andreas Hüttemann - University of Cologne

Olivier’s choice of mentor is Pr. Dr. Andreas Hüttemann, philosopher of science/physics who holds the Chair for Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Cologne. He is a member of the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina. He recently led two major research units, Causation, Laws, Dispositions and Explanations and Inductive Metaphysics (DFG). He is a leading researcher in metaphysics and philosophy of science and an expert on the topic of emergence and reduction. His last book, A Minimal Metaphysics for Scientific Practice, has been recently published by the Cambridge University Press (2021).

Pr. Dr. Andreas Hüttemann was the supervisor of Olivier Sartenaer’s von Humboldt fellowship in Cologne (2017-2019). Together with other local collaborators, they studied transformational emergence during seminars and co-organized an international conference on the topic, which subsequently gave birth to a special issue in the leading analytic philosophy journal Synthese.

Membership