Ph D defense passed

On the 9th of February I had my first Ph D defense, under the hat of the Philosophy of Science Department within the Institute for Philosophical Research, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Had nasty flu for the weeks before the defense and did not feel very well at the event but at the end of the day all went fine. Two quite positive reviews of the thesis, nice comments by my supervisor and some questions. Criticism from my friend, the deputy editor for "The World of Physics", who argued that the most important purpose of thought experiments is the heuristic one. Personally, I did not quite see how is that opposing my main claim that some TE in science manage to provide a priori knowledge about the physical world. Further, the former dean of the philosophy dept. at Sofia University considered the threatment of only exact scientific TE as a serious deficiency of the thesis and required an explanation about how come so. I explained briefly that it is a declared main interest of the thesis to deal only with TE from physics.

Overall, felt quite relieved from the burden and still disappointed from the evident lack of true academic weight of the whole event.