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Jan Faye is a Danish philosopher of science and metaphysics. He is currently associate professor in philosophy at the University of Copenhagen.[1] Faye has contributed to a number of areas in philosophy including explanation,[2] interpretation, philosophy of the humanities and the natural sciences, evolutionary naturalism, philosophy of Niels Bohr,[3] and topics concerning time, causation, and backward causation (Retrocausality).[4]
He is educated in philosophy and physics at the University of Copenhagen, was a Research Fellow under the Carlsberg Foundation, a Visiting Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, and held a postdoc at the University of Cambridge, England. He has taught philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark since 1995.
In the area of metaphysics Faye defends the possibility of backward causation in his book The reality of the future (1989). Faye argues that the direction of causation can in principle be reversed with respect to time and that if something like backward causation were physically possible, then it would involve causal processes carrying negative energy forward in time. Also within metaphysics, in his Experience and Beyond (2016), Faye strongly rejects realism about abstract objects by claiming that humans are not adapted by natural selection to grasp real abstract entities. In contrast, he holds that we need to invent abstract concepts in order to be able to talk, say, about identity over time.
In his book Niels Bohr: His Heritage and Legacy (1991) and in several edited volumes dedicated to Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics, Faye has contributed to the understanding of Bohr's philosophical interpretation of quantum mechanics. Faye originally called Bohr an objective anti-realist because he sees Bohr’s interpretation as a case of anti-realism with respect to the theory of quantum mechanics, but not with respect to atomic entities. But where Bohr rejected representationalism with respect to the quantum formalism and regarded quantum theory as a tool for prediction, Faye has later advocated the view according to which the basic laws of nature properly understood are explicit language rules. However, parts of the pragmatism and naturalism that form the back-bone of Faye’s own philosophy may be traced back to his understanding of Bohr.
In Rethinking Science (2002), After Postmodernism (2012), and The Nature of Scientific Thinking (2014), Faye variously promotes the methodological unity among the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Faye defends this claim by developing a general pragmatic-rhetorical theory of explanation that attempts to cover all kinds of explanations in the sciences and the humanities.
Within the philosophy of mind, Faye has explored how we can understand consciousness from the evolutionary-naturalistic program he also pursues in his work on metaphysics. His thesis is that the properties of consciousness must be understood as extrinsic properties that arise from the organism's neural system constantly interacting with its surroundings. This is in contrast to traditional materialistic explanations of consciousness that have sought to understand consciousness by referring to intrinsic properties of the brain.
