4-year PhD Fellowship in Philosophy

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The PhD student’s work on a doctoral thesis will be supervised by Guillaume Fréchette in the framework of the SNSF funded Consolidator Grant project ‘The Origins of Contemporary European Thought 1837–1938. Texts and Genealogy’. A brief description of the project is provided below and on kkphil.com/ocet

The PhD student will join the Department of Philosophy, Geneva (Switzerland).

As per SNSF regulations, the gross salary will be between CHF 47'040 and CHF 50'040 per year.

The starting date is January 1, 2024, or as soon as possible thereafter.

Candidates must have a Master degree in philosophy and a background in 19 th /early 20 th century philosophy and/or early analytic philosophy and/or phenomenology. The candidate will be selected on the basis of his/her fittingness to the research project and her/his 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, paper, essay)

(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:

1. 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;
2. 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;
3. 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.