Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Medicine

Jordi Cat received a M.A. from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Davis in 1995. He has held postdoctoral positions at Harvard University, the Max Planck Institute for History of Science in Berlin, The London School of Economics and the University of Chicago.

His research interests are in all three areas: philosophy of science, history of science and history of philosophy of science, and in their intersections (philosophy of history next). In particular, issues of unity and pluralism, the application of mathematics, precision and approximation, scientific planning, modeling, causality, visual and material culture and 19th & 20th-century history of physics and philosophy of science (Victorian physics and philosophy of science, especially Maxwell, and Logical Empiricism, especially Neurath).

Cat has published numerous articles on the history and philosophy of science and its history as a discipline. He is the author of Fuzzy Pictures as Philosophical Problem and Scientific Practice (Springer 2016); Maxwell, Sutton and the Birth of Color Photography (Palgrave-Macmilan 2013); and co-author of Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Philosophy (Cambridge Univ. Press 1995) with Nancy Cartwright, Lola Fleck and Thomas Uebel.

Cat cofounded the IU 19th-Century Forum and is a fellow of the Center for Integrative Photographic Studies. He is currently completing, inter alia, three books: on pluralism and mechanistic and functional explanation; on Polanyi and Neurath on animation; and on the reception of relativity theory and the relation between mathematics, physics and philosophy of science at Indiana University in the early 20th century.

Recent articles include: “The performative construction of natural kinds: mathematical application as practice” (in C. Kendig, ed., Natural Kinds and Classification in Scientific Practice, Routledge 2016) and “Images and logic of the light cone: Tracking Robb's postulational turn in physical geometry” (Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 2016).