Anna Carolina Regner

Visiting Professor, History and Philosophy of Science

Bldg. 200, Rm. 27
Stanford, CA 94305-2024
650-723-2760
aregner@portoweb.com.br

Background:

Anna Carolina K. P. Regner is Professor of Philosophy at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and currently Visiting Professor at Stanford in the Program in History and Philosophy of Science. From 1994-1996, she was a Senior Fulbright Scholar and Lecturer at Saint Mary's College of California and a Visiting Scholar in the Center for Latin American Studies at Stanford. Her research has been mainly focused on the epistemological, metaphysical and methodological aspects of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection as these aspects are approached from a broader contextual and historical point of view. She has taught courses on epistemology, philosophy of biology, contemporary philosophy of science, and theory of argumentation, emphasizing the contextual and historical nature of the questions to be discussed within these subjects. Her published work includes several articles, book chapters, and the book Charles Darwin - Notas de viagem: a tessitura social no pensamento de um naturalista, Porto Alegre: EST, 1988, in which she translates into Portuguese the passages on social and political phenomena from Darwin's diary on the Beagle, and then analyzes the contribution of their social, political, and metaphysical elements to Darwin's later theory of natural selection.

As a researcher of CNPq, the Brazilian National Research Council for the Development of Science and Technology, her latest research project investigates the role of rhetoric in scientific rationality. A grant from CAPES, a Brazilian Foundation under the aegis of the Ministry of Education of Brazil, is funding her year as Visiting Professor at Stanford in order to develop the project "Reconstructing the long argument of the Origin of Species: a study on the strategies of scientific rationality". Committed to the development of the philosophy and history of science in Brazil and South America, she was one of the founders and first chair of the interdisciplinary group in philosophy and history of science affiliated with the Institute for Latin American Advanced Studies of UFRGS / Grupo Interdisciplinar em Filosofia e HistŪria das CiĶncias / GIFHC-ILEA/UFRGS (http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/gifhc ). From 1996-2001, she was the editor of Episteme: Filosofia e HistŪria das CiĶncias em Revista (http://www.ilea.ufrgs.br/episteme/), a journal in history and philosophy of science published by GIFHC / ILEA/UFRGS. In 1998, as the Chair of this group, she organized the First Meeting on Philosophy and History of Science of the Southern Cone in Porto Alegre, bringing together researchers from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. In 2000, on the occasion of the Second Meeting, in Buenos Aires, she was one of the founders of the Association for the Philosophy and History of Science of the Southern Cone (AFHIC).

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