Dr. Alice Murphy

Alice Murphy is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy of science at the MCMP. Prior to joining the center, she received her PhD (2020) from the University of Leeds, her MA (2015) from the University of Warwick and her BA (2014) from the University of Bristol.

Research

Alice is interested in the imagination and creativity, aesthetics, social epistemology, and the relations between thought experiments and other practices in science such as computer simulations and physical experiments. She is currently co-editing a volume (with Milena Ivanova) on the aesthetics of scientific experiments (Routledge, forthcoming), and is working on the role of aesthetic values and imagination in the context of central topics in the epistemology of science such as understanding, and trust and testimony. More about her work, and her published and working papers, can be found on her website: https://sites.google.com/view/alicemurphy/home

At LMU, Alice teaches BA and MA courses in these areas and others, and supervises dissertations on topics within feminist epistemology, models and fictions in science, and philosophy of art.

Publications

• 'Imagination in Science', Philosophy Compass (forthcoming).
• ‘The Value of Surprise in Science’ (co-authored with Steven French), Erkenntnis (forthcoming).

• ‘Toward a Pluralist Account of the Imagination in Science’, Philosophy of Science, Vol. 87 (5), 2020.

• ‘The Aesthetic and Literary Qualities of Scientific Thought Experiments’, in French, S. and Ivanova, M. eds, Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding, Routledge, 2020.