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 trades 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.

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 Professor 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:

Professor Hansson has publicly criticed Anthroposophy as a pseudo science.

See the complete list of Hansson's publications.

References

1. Hansson's c.v.
2. Is Anthroposophy Science? On line copy of article in Conceptus XXV (1991), No. 64, pp. 37-49.
3. The Racial Teachings of Rudolf Steiner Skeptic Report, June/ July 2005.According to the original publication of the article in Swedish (Folkvett nr 3/2004.), it was written in response to criticism of the Swedish branch of the CSICOP for its publication the previous year of a critical anthology on anthroposophy as being repeatedly unreliable.

External links

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