Alexander Franklin

I'm a senior lecturer in philosophy at King's College London.  My research aims to understand how the world fits together: to that end I spend a lot of my time thinking about various bits of science and the corresponding philosophy of science. My overall goal is to articulate a detailed and science-informed alternative to the lego-brick model that metaphysics has occasionally been guilty of positing – that is,  to show how everything fits together without assuming that all the parts have their properties independently or are otherwise lego-like. 

To that end I've written papers that look at the details of inter-scale and inter-theoretic relations in a variety of cases within condensed matter physics (with Eleanor Knox), quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and between physics and chemistry (co-authored with Vanessa Seifert, this won the Popper prize). I've also written on the metaphysical framework through which I address such questions with Katie Robertson. My work fits into the broad framework of reductionism, and to that end I've written papers responding to the multiple realisation argument and the multiscale argument. 

I have papers under review on the emergence of chance from chaos and the nature of probabilities in Everettian quantum mechanics. I'm also working on a short book about the emergence of the classical from quantum mechanics, an article about the use of limits in philosophy of physics, a chapter for a graduate textbook on reduction, an article about rigour in philosophy of physics, another article about the relation between physics and chemistry, and an article about the metaphysics of race.   

For a more detailed account of my research, my papers are available here, and more accessible accounts of my work are available here.

 I spent Spring 2023 as a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of California Irvine. Before 2020, I was a postdoctoral research associate with 'The Metaphysical Unity of Science' project at the University of Bristol (where I'm still an honorary research associate).  Prior to that I was a teaching fellow at King's College London, where I also completed my PhD. My PhD at King's was awarded in 2019, was supervised by Dr Eleanor Knox and Professor David Papineau, and was fully funded by a studentship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership.  I spent the autumn term in 2016 at the University of Pittsburgh where I worked with Professor Robert Batterman and Dr Porter Williams. I completed the MPhilStud degree at King's in 2015 and I graduated from the 4-year Physics and Philosophy MPhysPhil at Brasenose College, University of Oxford in 2013. I was taught philosophy at Brasenose by Dr Chris Timpson.