Aristides Baltas
Aristides Baltas is a philosopher of science and physicist who served as the Minister of Culture and Sports of Greece and as the Minister of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs in the cabinet of Alexis Tsipras from 27 January 2015 to 4 November 2016.
He is currently the Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Science at the National Technical University of Athens and President of the Nicos Poulantzas Institute. In the September 2015 Greek legislative election, he was elected MP for the Attica constituency with Syriza.
Education and academic career
Baltas trained in electrical and mechanical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens from 1962 to 1967 before going on to complete a doctorate in theoretical physics under at University of Paris XI in 1971. His thesis title was La Neutrino-Production des Résonances Baryoniques dans le Modèle des Quarks. In 1982, he returned to NTUA to become a lecturer at the Department of Physics. From 1984 to 1985 he was a visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh, a capacity he later resumed in 2005–6. He was appointed assistant professor of philosophy and methodology of physics at NTUA in 1984, then associate professor of the philosophy of science in 1992 and professor in 2002.Baltas's research has dealt particularly with the epistemology of Louis Althusser, and more generally with the relationship between philosophy of science and epistemology and between analytic and continental philosophy. His work encompasses the fields of physics, mathematics, psychoanalysis, and historical materialism. Other philosophers studied by Baltas include Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza, Jacques Derrida, John McDowell, and Walter Benjamin.