What is your current role and how did you get here?

I am currently an Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (IFIS PAN). This is a purely research position. I am also a visiting researcher at the Donders Centre for Neuroscience, Radboud University, as well as in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Groningen.

I like to say that I took a scenic route to a career, as I held eight postdoctoral or temporary positions across Europe, and completed my graduate studies across multiple institutions. Of course, this level of precariousness was not entirely my choice; it reflects the current state of the academic job market. Still, I am genuinely grateful that I was able to spend time at so many institutions in different countries, immersed in their local intellectual cultures and in great cities, from Berlin to London, Paris and The Hague. I learned from different styles of thinking, social dynamics, and the character of each place, not only about philosophy and science, but also about myself. I have no doubt that I am a more complete and richer person because of it.

I began my undergraduate studies at the University of Belgrade. After completing them, I moved to Vienna to pursue a PhD, and later transferred to Humboldt University in Berlin, from which I received my doctorate. I was also a visiting PhD student at King’s College London, where I worked with Professor David Papineau, who later served as one of my PhD examiners.

After my PhD, I returned to Serbia and worked as a PI on my own project, funded by the local government, at the University of Novi Sad and hosted in the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology. Once that project was completed, I moved to the Institute for Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy at University of Belgrade, where I worked as a research associate until I received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship under the EU’s Horizon 2020 Programme. The fellowship was hosted at IHPST (CNRS–Sorbonne Panthéon Paris 1) in France.

About six months before starting my Marie Curie project, together with the first cohort of EPSA fellows, we founded the EENPS. I served as its founding coordinator and later as secretary. Building EENPS and being part of it remains one of my most prized achievements. I still swell when I think of its early beginnings and how it grew from an initial 15 members to over 250 today, how it developed multiple seminars, interest groups, a mentoring program, and a series of successful biannual conferences, culminating in PSA Around the World conference, organized jointly with the Philosophy of Science Association. EENPS gave me not only a platform to challenge structural biases and prejudices against scholars from our region, but also lasting friendships.

In particular, I share a deep friendship with Borut Trpin. Alongside our professional collaborations, our friendship is grounded in music. We initially bonded over some of our favorite musicians and discovered early on that we were both fans of Jamie Lidell, as well as various new and old indie and post-punk bands, such as Yard Act and Fontaines D.C. We continue to surprise each other with new musical discoveries. During the pandemic, we even made music together, which can be found here.

I also deeply value my friendships with others who have been part of EENPS since its founding and along the way. With some of them I collaborate closely on central projects, while with others I follow their work with keen interest. For example, I think that Magdalena Malecka, Dunja Šešelja, and Joanna Karolina Malinowska are doing work that is both very important and genuinely original.

After completing my Marie Curie fellowship, I took up a postdoctoral position at the University Bordeaux Montaigne. I was then invited to Radboud University as part of the Radboud Excellence Initiative. This marked my most productive period and a significant expansion of my collaborations. After Radboud, I held a postdoctoral position in Humane AI at Leiden University, and upon completing that project, I served for a semester as a temporary lecturer at the University of Groningen.

At the same time, the opportunity at IFIS PAN arose. I applied and was fortunate to be offered the position. I am very happy in this role, as I am developing a multifaceted research collaboration and friendship with Marcin Miłkowski, who works in another department at IFIS PAN. We are currently working on a project of mapping explainability norms in AI using data-driven methods from computational linguistics. In 2023, Marcin organized my visit to his research group, during which I presented my then work-in-progress paper on corpus analyses of explanatory landscape in neuroscience, a joint work with Willem Halffman, now published in Synthese. During that visit, we also wrote and published a short commentary in the Journal of Neuroscience. Finally, we developed a Cotutelle Agreement for Joint Supervision between the Polish Academy of Sciences – Graduate School for Social Research (GSSR) and Leiden University, under which we co-supervise a doctoral student.

Why did you become a philosopher of science? 

I was initially trained as a philosopher of mind. My PhD dissertation focused on the explanatory gap problem. Throughout my undergraduate and graduate studies, my interests were primarily in mainstream philosophy of mind, including mental causation, zombie arguments, and the philosophy of perception and pain, as well as in philosophy of language and modal epistemology insofar as their tools were deployed in philosophy of mind. The traditional topics in philosophy of science that I encountered as an undergraduate, such as scientific discovery, progress, and the structure of scientific theories, did not seem as exciting as the metaphysical and epistemological problems in philosophy of mind.

During my PhD, however, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the way the explanatory gap was framed. The core question, as I came to see it, was why some explanations are more intelligible than others. It appeared to me that much of the debate presupposed a single theory of explanation, a broadly semantic one associated with the Canberra Plan developed by David Lewis, Frank Jackson, Dave Chalmers, and others.

In response, I proposed a different framework based on quality space models. I argued that pain, like the perceptual experience of color, can be analyzed geometrically using quality space models originally developed in philosophy of perception. At the time I described this as “topological,” though I would now characterize it more precisely as a state-space structural explanation.

While working on this project, I began reading contemporary work in philosophy of science on explanation. That opened the floodgates. I discovered a rich plurality of accounts of explanation that went far beyond the semantic framework dominating the philosophy of mind debates. This shift led me to develop my account of topological explanations, explanatory pluralism, and explanatory pragmatics.

Importantly, moving into philosophy of science did not mean abandoning metaphysics and epistemology. On the contrary, my current work allows me to engage these issues more systematically, including realization and constitution relations, causation and counterfactual dependence, ontic backing, explanatory relevance, intelligibility, explanatory depth, factivism, and understanding. Philosophy of science became, for me, the natural extension of the questions that first drew me into philosophy.

What is your current project and how are you pursuing it?

My current research is developed along several complementary lines, encompassing the philosophical foundations of topological and non-causal explanations in sciences; pragmatics of explanatory relevance in sciences and explainable AI; and mapping the structure and dynamics of explanatory norms.

My best-known contribution is my account of topological explanations. Topological explanations show how complex phenomena of interest depend on the topological properties (mathematically quantifiable connectivity patterns) of networks built from citation networks, predation relationships in ecology, contagion relations in epidemiology, or fMRI data sets of the brain. My account provides necessary and sufficient conditions under which network models provide genuine explanations.

My most productive collaboration on this topic so far has been with Kareem Khalifa. We have published together a number of papers. Over time, our professional partnership naturally grew into a close friendship. Whenever we have the chance to meet in person, we make a point of playing music together. Some of our musical collaborations have even been released on Bandcamp.

Together with Jim Woodward, I'm currently guest-editing a Topical Collection in Synthese on "New Work on Networks." You can find out more about it here.

And finally, I’m working on my book in which I am synthesizing my work on topological explanations.

The work on topological explanations has led me to the much broader issue about the pragmatics of explanations, on which I am working at the moment and will continue in the future, especially on its application to the explainable AI.

Namely, different kinds of scientific explanation provide unique types of knowledge unavailable through other kinds. We often also use different kinds of explanation in ensemble to understand different aspects of the same phenomenon.

The problem is that when we apply the criteria for evaluating one kind of explanation to other kinds, those other kinds do not seem like explanations at all. In the absence of a general account of the pragmatics of explanatory relevance, it is question-begging why one rather than another set of epistemic norms should be the correct analysis of explanatory power in different contexts. I aim to fill this gap by providing a general pragmatic account of explanatory relevance based on erotetic logic, or the logic of posing questions. An explanatory norm is relevant in a context of inquiry if the set of propositions expressing that context erotetically implies the explanation-seeking question. Questions, on this view, can be conclusions in arguments that show how a question arises from certain contexts.

I am currently writing a series of papers with Chris Pincock, on an application of my pragmatic and his ontic account of explanatory relevance to a broader set of issues that arise across social sciences, neuroscience, and complexity science. And with Nava Tintarev of Maastricht University, I am working on further development and formalization of a pragmatic theory of explainability relevance specifically in AI.

As I mentioned in my previous answer, I work closely with Marcin Miłkowski on developing a data-driven approach to extracting explainability norms in AI research that will help integrate contextual information into a pragmatic account of explanatory relevance.

Is your research affected by your location in the region of Central and Eastern Europe?

Yes, it certainly has an impact, mostly through the chronic lack of funding, internal bureaucracy, and external structural biases and prejudices, which are often reflected in the distribution of competitive ERC grants and in the recognition of scholarly achievements.

To be fair, some of the bureaucratic dysfunction is not exclusive to our region. I've witnessed it firsthand in France, Germany, and across Scandinavia: researchers buried under mountains of printed documents that often get lost, procedures that drag on for months, formatting requirements that seem designed for someone with a law degree rather than a philosophy PhD.

That particular absurdity travels well.

What doesn't travel as easily is the more personal weight of bias and prejudice. Most of my colleagues from the region, myself included, have books' worth of horror stories about discrimination, microaggressions, and sometimes outright hostility. Just to give you a taste: when I was a Marie Curie fellow, a German colleague said to me, with genuine surprise, "Oh, I didn't know they had an east European version of the Marie Curie." The implication was clear, that the standards must have been adjusted for me to be competitive. There is, for the record, only one Marie Curie Fellowship program.

Coming from Serbia, which is not an EU member state, meant facing additional bureaucratic constraints throughout my career: repeated, prolonged, and expensive residence and work permit procedures that often involved administrative interviews, and limitations on mobility and employment that many of my peers simply never had to think about. These procedures consumed time and money that could have gone toward research. Like many scholars from the region, I simply had more barriers to overcome.

Navigating those conditions required additional effort, composure, and persistence. Time and energy that could have gone directly into research or into time with my loved ones was instead redirected toward managing institutional barriers and processing the psychological toll of these biases. But these experiences did not determine my intellectual trajectory. If anything, they demanded greater clarity of purpose and discipline, which I never lacked to begin with.

None of this shaped the intellectual content of my work in any meaningful way. I chose my topics by following my curiosity and ambition, as any researcher does, and none of them are inherently region-specific. My early work on the philosophy of pain grew out of the formative influence of the late Nikola Grahek, a philosopher from the University of Belgrade internationally recognized for his work on pain, and a generous and inspiring teacher. But, that kind of intellectual inheritance isn't regional; great teachers exist everywhere.

In my own case, I encounter these things less and less, at least not so openly. Partly that's a function of being more established. But it's also a choice: over the years I've stopped letting it pass. I now challenge it directly, in the moment, every time. That shift has cost me some comfort in certain rooms, but I've never regretted it.

What are your hopes for philosophy of science in your institution/city/country?

I am very optimistic about the future because some of the challenges I mentioned in my previous answer are already being addressed. Many colleagues from the region now publish regularly in top journals, serve on governing boards and committees of international organizations such as EPSA, ESPP, SPP, and PSA, and sit on the editorial boards of major journals.

The next two EPSA conferences will also be held in the region: in 2027 in Warsaw, where my current home institution, IFIS PAN, is one of the hosts, and in 2029 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. I am very pleased to be involved in both bids and to serve on the local organizing committees. These developments are in part the result of EPSA’s long-term efforts, formally initiated with the first EPSA fellowships ten years ago, which have contributed both to greater recognition and to reducing structural biases.

My hope for the future is to consolidate these gains and to secure greater stability and resources, so that we can all flourish.

You can find out more about my work and service on my website:

https://daniel-kostic.weebly.com

You can find my papers on my profile on Philpeople:

https://philpeople.org/profiles/daniel-kostic

Or my Google scholar profile:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=phIO8wcAAAAJ&hl=en

You can follow me on Bluesky:

@danielkostic.bsky.social

What is your current role and how did you get here?

I am currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, with affiliation also at the University of Maribor. My path into philosophy of science was importantly shaped by early exposure to international academic contexts. During my first year of PhD, I attended a cognitive science summer school in Sofia in 2014, where I met Lilia Gurova (New Bulgarian University), who later also became one of the founding members of EENPS, and where I had the opportunity to learn from leading researchers such as Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh). This was one of the first moments where I felt treated as an equal participant in the field rather than as someone coming from a peripheral academic context.

Shortly after, I received DAAD and MCMP funding for a semester visit to Munich in 2015, which proved decisive for my subsequent career. There, I became part of a vivid research community and got in touch with Stephan Hartmann, who later became my co-supervisor and a long term collaborator, and who hosted me as a postdoc at the MCMP, LMU Munich between 2019 and 2025. Around the same time, I benefited from an EPSA scholarship for a research stay at the University of Barcelona's Logos Center. Other international experiences, such as the International Rationality Summer Institute in 2016, where I got in closer contact with Jan Sprenger, and a tutorial in computational philosophy at the University of Belgrade with Dunja Šešelja and Kevin Zollman as instructors, also played an important role in helping me build a professional network I could rely on.

Alongside these opportunities, the founding of the EENPS in 2016 was particularly important for me. Through EENPS, I got in touch with many colleagues with whom I am still in close personal and professional contact today. One connection that has been particularly formative for me is Daniel Kostić, with whom I have developed a close professional collaboration that is now also becoming institutional, as well as a friendship that extends beyond academic contexts. The network helped create a sense of regional community that complemented international mobility and made it easier to see oneself as part of a shared intellectual project rather than as working in isolation.

Looking back, it was this combination of international exposure and remaining embedded in the Slovene and regional context that gradually opened the path toward my current position.

Why did you become a philosopher of science?

I have been interested in scientific reasoning for a long time, even before starting my PhD, although it took me some time to articulate what exactly drew me to it. What eventually crystallised my interest was the tension between formal methods and the messy reality of scientific practice. Questions about uncertainty, idealisation, and the limits of formal models have been central to my thinking from early on. Philosophy of science offered a space in which one can take both normative ideals and the actual practices of science seriously, without collapsing one into the other.

What is your current project and how are you pursuing it?

My current work focuses on coherence-based approaches to scientific reasoning, especially in contexts of uncertainty, disagreement, and complex modelling. I work at the intersection of formal epistemology, philosophy of science, and cognitive science, and increasingly combine philosophical analysis with computational tools. Much of this work is collaborative, which is important both intellectually and practically, as it allows problems to be approached from different methodological and disciplinary angles.

Is your research affected by your location in Central and Eastern Europe?

Yes, in fairly concrete ways. Working in Central and Eastern Europe often means that local communities in specialised subfields are relatively small, which can create a sense of intellectual isolation at times. At the same time, this makes international engagement almost a default mode of academic life rather than an optional extra. There is also a structural dimension to this. Many research agendas and publication standards are set elsewhere, and learning how to participate in these conversations from a smaller academic environment is an important part of the professional formation for many scholars in the region.

Does practicing philosophy of science in this region present special challenges or opportunities?

The main challenges are institutional and practical. Funding is limited, teaching loads are heavy, and research time is often fragmented. At the same time, there are genuine opportunities. Regional networks like EENPS create intellectual communities that would otherwise be difficult to sustain locally. Ljubljana and Slovenia more generally also have a geographical advantage. While we are in some respects academically not (yet) central players, we are physically very close to several major centres of philosophy of science such as Rijeka, Salzburg, Vienna, Munich, and Italy, e.g., Ancona, Milan, and Turin. This makes in-person collaboration relatively easy, and while the pandemic was disruptive in many ways, the rapid normalisation of digital communication has at least reduced the sense of distance.

What are your hopes for philosophy of science in your institution, city, or country?

Locally, I hope that philosophy of science becomes more firmly recognised as a serious and distinctive field that can contribute not only within philosophy but also to scientific practice and public debates about science. This is not always straightforward in contexts where what is labelled as philosophy of science or epistemology has historically been more sociological or continental in orientation. The internationally connected philosophy of science tradition has a great deal to offer here, and the challenge is to make this visible and institutionally supported.

More broadly, I hope for sustained support for international collaboration that treats scholars from Central and Eastern Europe as equal partners in shaping research agendas rather than merely as participants. Networks like EENPS and EPSA already play an important role in this respect. Our recent collaborative publications (all from 2025), such as 'Coherence as a Constraint on Scientific Inquiry' in Synthese with Martin Justin, 'The Mix Matters: Exploring the Interplay Between Epistemic and Zetetic Norms in Scientific Disagreement' in the BJPS with Martin Justin, Dunja Šešelja and Christian Straßer, and 'Testing Abductions from Uncertain Evidence' in the Philosophical Quarterly with Finnur Dellsén reflect the kind of national and international cooperation that I find especially valuable.

Let me wrap this up by mentioning that it is also a particular pleasure to note that EPSA 2029 conference will take place in Ljubljana, which makes it feel as if some of these hopes are already beginning to take concrete shape.

This blog explores what it means to practice philosophy of science in the region of Central and Eastern Europe. What kinds of challenges shape philosophical work here? Are there distinctive advantages compared to other parts of the world? How have regional histories, including the legacy of communism, influenced philosophical inquiry, and how do they continue to shape it today? We intend to cover both individuals and institutions and to create space where our members can showcase their existing work and share experiences that inspire future excellence.