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Website: 4TU.nl

Henrik Thorén

I am a researcher and a philosopher of science at the department of philosophy at Lund University, Sweden, where I am currently leading a project on values in climate economics. My research covers several methodological and conceptual issues in the sciences that study sustainability, climate change, and the environment. I am particularly interested in how science should be best deployed in policy and decision-making situations in democratic societies and the roles non-epistemic values play in scientific knowledge and knowledge production.

My academic background is in the humanities with a master’s degree from Gothenburg University in theoretical philosophy and history. My PhD is in Theoretical Philosophy from Lund University—my dissertation was written as part of the Linneaus project LUCID and concerned how to bridge and integrate knowledge from the various disciplines that make the foundation of sustainability science. I have written extensively on the concept of resilience and its possibilities and limitations, especially examining subtle differences in the use of the notion in different disciplines such as sustainability science, ecology, psychology, material science, and the social sciences more broadly.

I have held post-doctoral fellowships at Lund University and the University of Helsinki, where I was working at the Department of Practical Philosophy with an association with the sustainability science center HELSUS. Since 2020 I have been back in Lund as the principal investigator in the Formas funded research project RIVET on climate economics.

Pursuing resilience is a value in human-nature systems is a complex and inter- and transdisciplinary problem. It is both a matter of empirically studying real systems, developing conceptual and theoretical frameworks, and finding ways of way managing values and normative assumptions. Here centres such as the 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering can play a crucial role.

I am involved in the 4TU Centre for Resilience Engineering to work with Jose Cañizares Gaztelu and others to work on philosophical aspects of the concept of resilience focusing in particular on the management of normative assumptions

I was a Research Fellow in the 4TU.DeSIRE programme.