2 postdoc positions in Philosophy at the University of Geneva
The postdoc researchers will be part of the research team of the SNSF funded Consolidator Grant project ‘The Origins of Contemporary European Thought 1837–1938. Texts and Genealogy’ led by Guillaume Fréchette. A brief description of the project is provided below and on kkphil.com/ocet
The Postdocs will join the Department of Philosophy, Geneva (Switzerland).
The candidates will be hired on a 50% basis for an initial period of 2 years, with a possible extension of their contract for up to 3 years (i.e. for a maximum of 5 years in total). The gross salary as collaborateur scientifique on a 50% basis corresponds roughly to 50000 CHF/year.
The starting date is January 1, 2024, or as soon as possible thereafter.
Candidates must have a PhD degree in philosophy and a background in 19 th /early 20 th century philosophy and/or 19 th /early 20 th century history and/or early analytic philosophy and/or phenomenology. The candidates will be selected on the basis of their fittingness to the research project and their scientific excellence.
Deadline for applications is October 27, 2023.
Applicants must submit their dossier as a single PDF file to frechette.guillaume@gmail.com with ‘PhD application’ in the subject line. The dossier should include:
(i) a cover letter describing the candidate’s background and profile and the fit between the candidate’s interests and abilities and the Consolidator Grant project;
(ii) a CV;
(iii) one writing sample; (e.g. thesis chapter or article)
(iv) the contact details of two possible academic references.
SNSF Consolidator Grant ‘The Origins of Contemporary European Thought 1837–1938. Texts and Genealogy’ Contemporary European philosophical thinking, to paraphrase Snell, begins with the Austrians and the Germans. Although the analytic-continental divide—the most widely accepted mapping of the vast regions of contemporary European thought—is a quite eloquent illustration of this fact, we find very little historical, philosophical, and editorial work on the sources of the divide. This project aims to fulfil this desideratum by following a threefold objective:
- Genealogically, the project will focus on philosophers of the geographical space who are at the origins of the main movements and tendencies of contemporary European thought: Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848), Ernst Mach (1838–1916) and Franz Brentano (1838–1917). Indeed, many of the contemporary innovations in logic, semantics and ontology derive from Bolzano, the ‘Leibniz from Bohemia’, while Mach is the father of the philosophy of the natural sciences and Brentano the originator of contemporary philosophy of mind and phenomenology;
- The project will show how these three major figures were involved in the major disagreements concerning the history of the late nineteenth–early twentieth centuries, disagreements which gave rise to contemporary European thought;
- Finally, it will provide and make use of primary sources, e.g. the literary remains, correspondence and lecture manuscripts of these three thinkers, and make these materials available in the form of editions and translations, as the very existence of this desideratum derives largely from insufficient or non-existent translations and editions of the primary sources of contemporary European thought and from our largely deficient knowledge of its corpus.