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Mario Hubert

  • Position: Assistant Professor, Philosophy
  • Department: Department of Philosophy
Brief Biography

Before joining the Department of Philosophy at The American University in Cairo (AUC), Mario Hubert was the Howard E. and Susanne C. Jessen postdoctoral instructor in the philosophy of physics at the California Institute of Technology from 2019 to 2022. Hubert also received an Early Postdoc Mobility Fellowship from the Swiss National Science Foundation for conducting research as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University and New York University between 2018 and 2019.

His research focuses on the ontology and epistemology of modern physics, such as classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and quantum mechanics. He is particularly interested in the following questions: What exists according to our best physical theories? and How can we know and understand what exists?

Hubert’s article When Fields Are Not Degress of Freedom, co-written with Vera Hartenstein, has received an honorable mention in the 2021 BJPS Popper Prize Competition, which is awarded to the article judged to be the best published in that year’s volume of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Hubert is an ordinary trustee of the Philosophy of Physics Society and a Fellow at the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics.

Research Interest

Areas of Specialization

  • Philosophy of Physics
  • Philosophy of Science
  • Metaphysics
  • Epistemology

Areas of Competence

  • History of Philosophy
  • History of Physics
Education
  • PhD in Philosophy, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, 2017
  • Diploma in Mathematics (equivalent to MSc, Minor: Theoretical Physics), LMU Munich, Germany, 2013

Articles

  • The History of Moral Certainty as the Pre-History of Typicality. In  Bassi, A., Goldstein, S., Tumulka, R., and Zanghì, N., editors, Physics and the Nature of Reality: Essays in Memory of Detlef Dürr. Heidelberg: Springer, 2024. [published version][preprint]
  • Towards Ideal Understanding, (with Federica Malfatti). Ergo, 10(22):578-611, 2023.
    [journal version][preprint]

  • Absorbing the Arrow of Electromagnetic Radiation(with Charles Sebens). Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 99: 10-27, 2023. [journal version] [preprint]

  • Is the Statistical Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ψ-Ontic or ψ-Epistemic? Foundations of Physics, 53(16):1-23, 2023. [journal version][preprint]

  • Understanding Physics: ‘What?’, ‘Why?’, and ‘How?’ European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 11(3):1-36, 2021. [journal version] [preprint]

  • Reviving Frequentism. Synthese, 199:5255-5284, 2021. [journal version] [preprint]

  • When Fields Are Not Degrees of Freedom, (with Vera Hartenstein).  The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 72(1):245-275, 2021. [journal version] [preprint]

Book Reviews

  • The World in the Wave Function: A Metaphysics for Quantum Physics by Alyssa Ney, Oxford University Press. Philosophy of Science, 89:864-875, 2022. [published version] [preprint

  • The Meaning of the Wave-Function: In Search of the Ontology of Quantum Mechanics, by Shan Gao, Cambridge University Press. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2017. [read the review]