Philosophy professor Rainer Hegselmann comes to Utrecht for lecture on Opinion Dynamics

On Friday November 18th, Rainer Hegselmann, philosophy professor at the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, will visit Utrecht to give a hybrid lecture for the Centre for Digital Humanities. Sign up now to join this lecture.

Hegselmann is well-known in the field of Opinion Dynamics. Together with mathematician Ulrich Krause, he developed the Hegselmann-Krause bounded confidence model of opinion dynamics. In this model individuals take seriously only those others whose opinions are not too far away from their own opinion. Simple extensions of the model cover radicalization, polarization, mis- and disinformation and truth seeking in a social setting. Although the model and its extensions are very simple, numerous surprising effects arise.

After the lecture there is room for questions and discussion. You can follow this lecture on location (in the Living Lab Digital Humanities) ór online.

Would you like to know more about the role computational models can play in philosophy? An interesting follow-up to this lecture is the CDH Tutorial Philosophy and computer simulations – two incompatible realms on November 30th. During this tutorial theoretical philosopher Dominik Klein will provide additional and practical insights to Hegselmann’s lecture.