Kort præsentation

Joeri Witteveen is a philosopher and history of science with a specialization in history and philosophy of biology. He studied at Maastricht University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the London School of Economics. He obtained his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Cambridge (Trinity College).

Joeri is the recipient of a Sapere Aude Starting Grant from the Danish Research Council (DFF) and a Semper Ardens Accelerate Grant from the Carlsberg Foundation.

His Sapere Aude project "Tackling the Conservationist’s Dilemma" (2023 - 2026) studies how to best navigate the epistemic and ethical tensions between science and policy making at the interface between biological taxonomy species conservation. Starting in late 2025, his Semper Ardens project "Human Variables in Biodiversity Assessment" (2025 - 2029) will expand on this research by studying the role of human values, aims, interests in the development of biodiversity metrics and categories more broadly. In particular, this project will aim to answer how 'human variables' introduce biases that compromise scientific objectivity, but also how they can be leveraged to create robust, responsible, and actionable biodiversity metrics.

Previously, Joeri was PI of the research project The Nature of Naming and the Naming of Nature (2017-2022), for which he received a VENI early career research grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO). He also served as co-PI of the research project Productive Ambiguity in Classification (2018-2021), together with philosophers, historians, taxonomists and bio-informaticians from Arizona State University. 

Joeri is associate editor of History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (Springer) and is a member of the Editorial Board of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (Elsevier) and Acta Biotheoretica (Springer).