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. 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, was fully funded by a studentship from the London Arts and Humanities Partnership, and was awarded the King's Elsevier Outstanding Thesis Prize.

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. 

For more information, see my website: alexanderfranklin.co.uk

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Philosophy of Physics
• Metaphysics
• Philosophy of Science

My research aims to understand how the world fits together: to that end I spend a lot of my time thinking about various bits of science and the corresponding philosophy of science. My overall goal is to articulate a detailed and science-informed alternative to the lego-brick model that metaphysics has occasionally been guilty of positing – that is, to show how everything fits together without assuming that all the parts have their properties independently or are otherwise lego-like.

To that end I've written papers that look at the details of inter-scale and inter-theoretic relations in a variety of cases within condensed matter physics (with Eleanor Knox), quantum mechanics, quantum field theory, and between physics and chemistry (co-authored with Vanessa Seifert, this won the Popper prize). I've also written on the metaphysical framework through which I address such questions with Katie Robertson. My work fits into the broad framework of reductionism, and to that end I've written papers responding to the multiple realisation argument and the multiscale argument.

My published papers are listed here.

Teaching

My teaching primarily relates to the analysis and interpretation of particular theories of physics, the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of science. In all cases I work to understand what scientific theories can tell us about the world. My teaching in the philosophy of race of course covers more normative issues as well.

Expertise and public engagement

I've been featured on a number of podcasts, have participated in some public panels, given public lectures, and written accessible pieces explaining my research. I'm keen to do more of this! Some past examples are here.

Selected publications

Incoherent? No, Just Decoherent: How Quantum Many Worlds Emerge. Philosophy of Science 91 (2). 2024.

Emerging into the rainforest: Emergence and special science ontology. European Journal for Philosophy of Science 14 (4): 1-26. 2024. With Katie Robertson.

The Problem of Molecular Structure Just Is The Measurement Problem. The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 75 (1). 2024. With Vanessa Angela Seifert.

How the Reductionist Should Respond to the Multiscale Argument, and What This Tells Us About Levels. In Katie Robertson & Alastair Wilson (eds.), Levels of Explanation. pp. 77-98. 2024.

Universality Reduced. Philosophy of Science 86 (5): 1295-1306. 2019.