Dr. René Baston is a researcher in philosophy and psychology with a focus on moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and phenomenology. He is currently a Research Associate at the Institute for Philosophy and Political Science (IPP) at TU Dortmund University, where his work explores implicit cognitive biases, agency, moral responsibility, and suicidology. He has published on topics such as the ontology of implicit bias, proactive control, moral agency, and the philosophy of suicide.
He completed his doctorate in philosophy at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf in 2019 with a dissertation on the nature of implicit prejudices and their implications for action theory and moral philosophy. His academic background includes a Master’s and a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Heinrich Heine University, as well as earlier studies in Computer Science at Hochschule Niederrhein.
FFP 2025 Project
Dr. René Baston’s final report on his Futures Fellow project “Rethinking Suicide Risk” is available here: Download the Final Report (PDF)
During his time as a Future Fellow, Dr. René Baston will develop an existing line of work: his Normic account of suicide risk, introduced in Beyond Prediction: A New Paradigm for Understanding Suicide Risk (Synthese, 2024). Meta-analyses show that standard risk factors in clinical psychology have low predictive power, which has prompted ongoing debate about the usefulness of traditional suicide risk assessment. After decades of research, factor-based models still do not yield clinically reliable predictions and generate high false-positive rates. Crucially, given existing data, clinicians cannot say anything action-guiding about the likelihood that a particular individual will engage in suicidal behavior.
To address this problem, Dr. Baston takes an alternative route. If risk does not need to be grounded in probabilities, then there is a way forward. The Normic account decouples “risk” from prediction and reframes it in terms of normalcy within a possible-worlds framework. The more easily suicidal action can be rendered intelligible, given norms of practical rationality and the balance between reasons for living and reasons for dying, the higher the risk. When life-sustaining reasons are fragile or absent, risk can be high even if standard factor-based models do not flag danger.
This reconceptualization aligns with broader debates in the philosophy of risk about whether there are objective, non-probabilistic concepts of risk. Historical work by Ian Hacking shows that people reasoned about risk long before the development of modern probability theory, which suggests that risk involves more than estimating the likelihood of an undesirable event. A possible-worlds, or normic, approach captures the explanatory and normative structure of risky situations. It clarifies how close a course of action is to being normal or readily intelligible.
While at Rutgers, Dr. Baston will meet with faculty and researchers to extend and refine this framework and to explore its clinical, ethical, and philosophical implications. He will be hosted by Susanna Schellenberg, Brian McLaughlin, Carolina Sartorio, and Andy Egan, whose expertise spans philosophy of mind, psychology, and moral theory. Rutgers has strong interdisciplinary connections to cognitive science and psychotherapy, which makes it an ideal environment for this project. Through these collaborations, Dr. Baston aims to advance the Normic account of suicide risk and to strengthen ties between Rutgers University and Ruhr University Bochum.
Latest Updates
On October 17, René Baston took part in the Bochum–Rutgers Mini-Workshop on “Belief and Imagination” held at Rutgers University. The workshop brought together researchers working in philosophy of mind, epistemology, and language, with a focus on bridging analytic and continental traditions. It took place at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science in Piscataway, NJ, from 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. René Baston presented his talk titled “Can Belief Explain Implicit Bias? Not Without a Theory of Reasoning.” Other speakers included Jenny Wang (Rutgers University), Tania Lombrozo (Princeton University), and Christian Scholz (Ruhr University Bochum). The event was organized by Pernille Hemmer (Rutgers University) and Albert Newen (Ruhr University Bochum).
