The fellowship has already made an important impact on my career. I acquired knowledge and developed skills in the fields of general philosophy of science, philosophy of neuroscience, and some in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mathematics, which are critical for further advancement of my academic career. As a result of the project's visibility, immediately after the fellowship I got a one-year postdoc job at the University of Bordeaux-Montaigne, and I was invited to submit an ERC Starting Grant proposal by the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ghent in Belgium, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam in Netherlands. I was also approached by Guillaume Marrelec and Alain Giron from the Laboratoire d’imagerie biomedicale (LIB)-CNRS/University of Sorbonne Paris 1, to start a project on the problem of interactions and dependencies in brain imaging. We are preparing a series of joint programmatic publications on this topic as well as a grant proposal. All this is a strong indication that my work and my profile as a researcher starts to be recognized both nationally in France as well as internationally. Furthermore, through my interdisciplinary seminar in philosophy of neuroscience I have established an initial collaboration platform between the host and several national and international neuroscience institutions that are highly regarded, i.e. 1) The Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière – ICM (Brain & Spine Institute) in Paris (France), 2) GIPSA-lab, Grenoble (France) which is internationally recognized for the research in Automatic Control, Signal and Images processing, Speech and Cognition, 3) Research Group for Translational Neurocircuitry, Max Planck Institute for Metabolism Research, Cologne (Germany), and the 4) Institute of Computational Neuroscience in Hamburg (Germany). Through workshops, seminars and special issues I have also connected the host with several top philosophy departments in the EU and overseas, particularly on the issues which were not previously covered by the research programs at the host institution (the topics include: explanatory asymmetries, non-causal explanations, scientific understanding), e.g. University of Nottingham (UK), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (USA), Simon Fraser University (Canada), University of Leeds (UK), Centre for Science Studies at Aarhus University (Denmark), University of Bergen (Norway), Duesseldorf Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (Germany), VU University Amsterdam (Netherlands).
Through these activities the project has also raised the quality of research within ERA, and these collaborative efforts will be extremely beneficial for the wide scientific community because it opens a unique opportunity for the researchers from very diverse backgrounds in sciences to work together with philosophers on some of the most difficult foundational and methodological issues of network approaches and theories of explanation. This unique and tremendously important interdisciplinary collaboration demonstrates that direct interests and influences between sciences and philosophy can result in the foundational work of the highest level, which in itself will help to broaden the reach and effectiveness of the EU funding instruments.
