Department of PhilosophyMax is a first-year PhD student from Farmville, VA. He completed his undergraduate work in philosophy and poverty studies at Washington and Lee University. There he defended an honors thesis on the development of Kuhn's incommensurability thesis which argued that contemporary neuroscientific work substantiates features of Kuhn's earliest iteration of the thesis found in his 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Maximilian Gebauer
B.A. Philosophy, Washington and Lee University, Honors in Philosophy, magna cum laude
Research Interests
Max's primary research areas are in ethics and the philosophy of science. In ethics, he is primarily interested in the normative dimensions of climate change including the subsistence-luxury emissions distinction, the foundations for the ethical consideration of future persons, value pluralism in environmental contexts, and compensatory schemes regarding non-economic losses and damages due to climate change.
In the philosophy of science, Max's work focuses on incommensurability, the values and criteria with which we evaluate complex models of natural systems, and the practice of discounting future costs. Additionally, he is interested in the possible role that recent developments in attribution science for extreme weather events could play regarding questions of blame and responsibility.
