Samantha Copeland

I am a philosopher interested in how we come to know things, what kinds of things we know, and why we think we know them. In particular, I am interested in situations where we know something but we don’t know what that something really is. For instance, how do we know when something is potentially valuable, when it might become valuable to us later, even when we don’t know when or how? And, equally important, I ask in my research questions about how we can form strategies to prepare for possibilities that we are uncertain about. This last issue is kinda urgent, given climate change and the radical shifts that we know are going to happen, in our societies and in our environment: how do we prepare to live in a world, when we don’t know what that world is going to look like, exactly? For this reason, I work on topics such as serendipity, emerging technologies, and resilience: situations where we want to be able to prepare for the unknown. In such situations, I think, epistemology and ethics necessarily interact. Further, I think that the way forward is through co-operation, diversity, and by being open to having our expectations overturned.

I am an assistant professor at TU Delft, in the Ethics/Philosophy of Technology section of the department of Values, Innovation and Technology. I am a member of the 4TU.Ethics and 4TU.Resilience Engineering Centres, and of the management team of the TPM Resilience Lab. I am a PI with the Convergence Initiative Impulse program umbrella flagship project, Converging Ethics for Converging Technologies, developing a new approach through institutional cooperation between EMC and TUD. I teach Ethics and Healthcare Technologies; Ethics, Philosophy of Science and Technology Assessment for Civil Engineers; Scientific Integrity for the graduate school and for new employees, and am co-developing a new course in ethics and safety science at TPM. Beyond academia, I am a co-founder and Chair of the Serendipity Society, an international and multidisciplinary network of people who research serendipity or who practice it in their work or craft.

Before this, I was a postdoctoral fellow with the CauseHealth project, led by Rani Lill Anjum, at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. I remain part of the Centre for Applied Philosophy of Science (CAPS-NMBU) and the CauseHealth team.

NMBU sam
Click here for my ORCID page, or here for my google scholar list of publications