Mauricio Suárez - Biography#

Mauricio Suárez earned his PhD in philosophy at the LSE in 1997 with a thesis on model-building in quantum theory. His early career included research and teaching positions at Oxford, St Andrews, and the LSE, as well as research positions at Wolfson College (Oxford), Northwestern University, the University of Sydney, and Harvard University. He was a Marie Curie Senior Research Fellow with a project on probability, conducted at London University, and a Research Fellow at the Institute Vienna Circle. In 2016, he was appointed a full professor in Logic and Philosophy of Science at Complutense University of Madrid. Suárez has attracted large amounts of research grants, among them the mentioned Marie Curie Senior Research Fellowship. He has been the Principal Investigator (PI) of eight successive research projects funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, in a continuous series that has provided training for the leading junior researchers in the philosophy of the physical sciences in Spain over the last 25 years.

Suárez is a truly international figure with a large number of research stays in the U.S., the UK, and EU countries. His philosophical outlook is shaped by both Analytical Philosophy and Pragmatism. His research profile in general philosophy of science is centered on scientific representation and model-building. He has developed and stands for the so-called inferential conception of scientific representation. This account is thoroughly practice-oriented, and deflationary, allowing for all kinds of model-building. Representational force is created by the intended use of scientists; while adequate models allow scientists to draw inferences about their subject domain. More recently, he has expanded this acount to the history of science and reconstructed model-building practices in Maxwell. His work has deeply shaped the field, coming to define the terms and boundaries of the debates over representation in the last two decades. His recent monograph for the University of Chicago Press (Inference and Representation, 2024) collects work over the last two decades and has been favourably reviewed in the main journals and outlets in the field, including two book symposia in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (SHPS) and Metascience. The second topical pillar of his work since 1998 concerns the history and philosophy of probability, in particular, their role in quantum theory. Suárez's approach features propensities, which he carefully distinguishes from objective probabilities and frequencies, all of them playing a distinct role in a "complex nexus of chance". He has extended this approach to biology and chemistry.

Suárez has given nearly two hundred and fifty invited and contributed addresses to all the main fori in history and philosophy of science across the world, including a large number of invited talks at prestigious conferences, such as the highly visible Bar-Hillel Colloquium at Tel-Aviv University this past April, as well as keynotes to the British Society for Philosophy of Science (BSPS), and a range of specialised conferences throughout Europe.

Suárez is a Corresponding Member of the International Academy for the Philosophy of the Sciences (AIPS) since 2008. In addition, he served as Vice-President of the European Philosophy of Science Association (EPSA) between 2009 and 2011. In this latter respect, he was a member of the founding Steering Committee in 2006 and the first elected Steering Committee 2007-2009, and thus played a pivotal role in establishing what has become the major institutional framework of philosophy of science in Europe. He organised the founding conference of EPSA in Madrid in 2007, which has served as the model for the successive meetings of the Association, up to and including the last conference in Groningen (2025). Suárez has been part of various panels appointed to evaluate European research, such as ERC synergy projects, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, or the Polish National Science Center.

For over two decades now, Suárez has been publishing his work in high-ranking journals, such as the European Journal tor Philosophy of Science, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Science, Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, Erkenntnis, and Synthese. These highly competitive publication outlets testify to the appreciation of his work by the corresponding scientific community.