James Mattingly

Originally from the Silicon Valley in California, I studied Great Books at St. Johns in Annapolis and Physics at UC Santa Cruz.

Bio and Featured Works

Originally from the Silicon Valley in California, I studied Great Books at St. John's in Annapolis and Physics at UC Santa Cruz. I then returned to a study of the History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University where I received my Ph. D. in 2002. Shortly before that I was appointed Assistant Professor in the Georgetown University Philosophy Department. My research is primarily in Philosophy of Science. I spend my efforts there about equally between general issues involving conceptual change in the sciences, the epistemology of science, the nature of scientific theories, and scientific explanation on the one hand, and issues more specific to philosophy of physics on the other including quantum gravity, general relativity, black holes and singularities, gauge theories, thermodynamics, electrodynamics. I also have research interests in early modern philosophy, the foundations of logic and mathematics, and the history of logical empiricism and other movements that attempted to come to grips with the profound conceptual reorientation made necessary by the revolutionary changes in science at the turn of the 20th century. More recently I have been trying to understand in what sense we can call any machines "agents" and what that entails going forward as AI appears to progress rapidly. I am the author of Information and Experimental Knowledge, University of Chicago Press 2021, the editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Theory in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics 2022, and co-author (with Beba Cibralic) of Machine Agency, MIT Press 2025.