Sven Ove Hansson

Sven Ove Hansson (born 1951) is a professor of philosophy and chair of the Department of Philosophy and History of Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden. He is an author and skeptic, with a special interest in environmental risk assessment, as well as in decision theory and belief dynamics.

Career

Hansson obtained a bachelor's degree in medical science in 1972, and then worked for a Swedish trade union, followed by a job with the Swedish Social Democrats. He received a PhD-degree in theoretical philosophy at Uppsala University in 1991, following which he was from 1993 to 1999 forskarassistent (the Swedish equivalent of an associate professor) at Uppsala. He received a second PhD-degree in practical philosophy at the University of Lund in 1999, and since 2000 he has been a professor at KTH; he became department head in 2005.^[1]

The Swedish Government appointed Hansson to the Products Control Board (1976–1982; the predecessor of the National Chemicals Inspectorate), the National Board for Spent Nuclear Fuel (1981–1992) and the Natural Science Foundation (1989–1992). He was also a member of two temporary Commissions on environmental policies appointed by the Swedish Government, expert advisor to a 1999–2000 Swedish government committee the kemikaliekommittén, and a member of the board of the MISTRA project New Strategy for the risk management of chemical substances. Since December 2000, Hansson has been a member of forskningsberedningen, the Swedish government’s advisory board of researchers .

Since September 1999 he has been the Editor-in-Chief of Theoria, the only international, peer-reviewed, philosophy journal published in Sweden. He was the founding chairperson of the Swedish Skeptics (Vetenskap och Folkbildning), and is still a board member and editor of the organisation’s journal Folkvett.

Publications

He has published numerous articles and books in Swedish and in English. Titles of English books are:

• Hansson, Sven Ove (1998). Setting the Limit. Occupational Health Standards and the Limits of Science. New York City, NY: Oxford University Press. p. 166. ISBN 978-0-19-512160-5. OCLC 37533943. 
• Hansson, Sven Ove (1999). A Textbook of Belief Dynamics, Theory Change and Database Updating. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. p. 398. ISBN 978-0-7923-5324-9. OCLC 39856021. 
• Hansson, Sven Ove (2001). The Structure of Values and Norms. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. p. 314. ISBN 978-0-521-79204-2. OCLC 44841554. 

Hansson has criticized anthroposophy as a pseudo science.^{[2] [3]}

See the complete list of Hansson's publications.

References

External links

• Homepage
• Brief biography at NanoBio-RAISE
• Brief biography at Research in Ethics and Engineering Conference, University of Delft, NL, April 2002 (pdf)