Alexander Franklin

I'm a senior lecturer in philosophy at King's College London.  Through my research I aim to understand why there is anything other than fundamental physics. In other words, my goal is to develop explanations of the existence of the special (non-fundamental) sciences, notwithstanding that the special sciences are, in some sense, reducible to physics.

 I think that explanations of the existence of the special sciences generally have the following form: features of lower-level systems (e.g. quantum mechanics or neurophysiology) can help explain the stability and autonomy of higher-level systems (respectively, classical mechanics or psychology). As such, my framework might be called 'reductionist'. 

Much of my work involves the detailed examination of case studies. In each case, I identify the structures and mechanisms which freeze out a set of lower-level variables, thus rendering the higher-level systems relatively autonomous. I claim that this ends up providing us with a reductive explanation of the emergence of higher-level science. I argue that this framework can shed light on a very wide variety of higher-level kinds, including socially constructed kinds.

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.