Gordon Belot

Professor Belot's primary interests are in philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. His most recent book, Accelerating Expansion: Philosophy and Physics with a Positive Cosmological Constant, explores some of the philosophical consequences of modern cosmology, focusing on the significance of the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe for our understanding of time, geometry, and physics. His earlier book, Geometric Possibility, explored the feasibility of adapting standard accounts of physical possibility to provide an account of geometric possibility of the sort required by relationalism about space. Most of his papers are concerned with inter-theory relations in physics, with the interpretative, methodological, and metaphysical implications of symmetry principles, or with confirmation and underdetermination. His current projects concern: (i) general relativity, cosmology, and boundary conditions; and (ii) epistemology for computable agents.  

Before joining the faculty at Michigan in 2008, he taught at Princeton University, New York University, and the University of Pittsburgh. He has held a post-doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Geometric Possibility won the 2014 Lakatos Award. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.