Clas Weber

Clas Weber is a Senior Lecturer in the Discipline of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia's School of Humanities. He holds a PhD from the Australian National University and has held postdoctoral positions at the University of Oslo and Humboldt Fellowship at Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. His research focuses on the philosophy of language, mind, and metaphysics, particularly self-locating content and mind-uploading. He leads the ARC-funded project 'Virtual Minds in the Real World: Mind-Uploading in the 21st Century.'

Education: PhD in Philosophy (Australian National University, 2014), supervised by David Chalmers, Frank Jackson, Jonathan Schaffer, and Daniel Nolan. Previous roles include Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo (2016–17) and Humboldt Fellow (2020).

Research Interests: Weber explores foundational issues in philosophy of language (linguistic relativity, formal semantics), philosophy of mind (personal identity, consciousness), and metaphysics (self-location, modality). His interdisciplinary work links AI research to traditional philosophical themes, such as mind-uploading's metaphysical and ethical implications. He also investigates how grammatical gender impacts societal structures, notably finding correlations between linguistic gender systems and domestic violence prevalence.

Publications highlight themes like de se attitudes, prudential concerns, and the economic effects of language. Recent work critiques optimistic views of mind-uploading through multiplicity objections. His article Gendered Language and Gendered Violence (2024) demonstrates linguistic gender's societal impact.

Awards: 2024 School of Humanities Mid-Career Research Award, 2020 Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship.

Grants/Supervision: Active ARC grant (2022–2025) exploring mind-uploading. He coordinates postgraduate programs and supervises research in his areas.

Labs/Teams: Leads interdisciplinary projects at the UWA Data Institute, collaborating on AI ethics and language's societal influence.