PhD Candidate/Junior Researcher in the History of Philosophy and Science

Are you fascinated by history, religion, philosophy, and science? Then you have a part to play as a PhD Candidate / Junior Researcher. You will examine the institutional Catholic Church’s response to the seventeenth century’s new philosophical and scientific currents. Additionally, you will map the internal struggles taking place within the church and its institutions at that time.

The Center for the History of Philosophy and Science at Radboud University, Nijmegen, is looking for a PhD Candidate / Junior Researcher to write a PhD thesis on "Contesting modernity: The suppression of atomism 1640-1680" as part of a four-year PhD project (or a five-year project in case of part-time employment). The aim of the project is to examine the response of the institutional Catholic Church to the seventeenth century's new philosophical and scientific currents.

You will analyse a range of specific published, unpublished or censored documents composed in Italy in the period 1640 to 1680, which were written by members of the Catholic clergy and in one way or another responded to the question of atomism. A description of the project can be found here. You may deviate from the project description in accordance with your own research interests and talents. This project will be conducted in collaboration with the Università di Roma Tre and may involve research stays in Rome.

• You have obtained a Master's degree in the history of philosophy or science or in intellectual history.
• You are acquainted with scholastic philosophy and terminology.
• You have some knowledge of early-modern atomism and corpuscularism.
• You are capable of reading Renaissance Latin (and preferably also Italian).
• Your English is sufficiently good to write a PhD in that language.
• You are a team worker, organiser, and an autonomous researcher.
• You are willing to take on a small amount of teaching (about 10%) in the domain of the history of philosophy.

• Employment for 0.8 (5 year contract) - 1.0 FTE (4 year contract).
• The gross starting salary amounts to €2,434 per month based on a 38-hour working week, and will increase to €3,111 from the fourth year onwards (salary scale P).
• You will receive 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus.
• You will be employed for an initial period of 18 months, after which your performance will be evaluated. If the evaluation is positive, the contract will be extended by 2.5 years (4 year contract) or 3.5 years (5 year contract).
• You will be able to use our Dual Career and Family Care Services. Our Dual Career and Family Care Officer can assist you with family-related support, help your partner or spouse prepare for the local labour market, provide customized support in their search for employment  and help your family settle in Nijmegen.
• Working for us means getting extra days off. In case of full-time employment, you can choose between 29 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the legally allotted 20.

The Center for the History of Philosophy and Science (CHPS) brings historians of philosophy and historians of science together in a single research unit. Its goal is to investigate the immensely rich discipline of natural philosophy and to describe its evolution in time from Antiquity to the 21st century. It pays particular attention to the period between 1250 and 1700, and to the consequences of the fragmentation of the Aristotelian worldview into the manifold of modern scientific disciplines, which no longer share common ontological and epistemological premises. This fragmentation of natural philosophy into different sciences, which do no longer share common ontological and epistemological premises, raises important questions for the contemporary philosopher of science, which are also addressed at CHPS.

Research topics addressed at CHPS include notions of place/space, time, matter, motion, chance and necessity, but also soul, mind and cognition. Within the global academic landscape, CHPS is unique in approaching the history of philosophy and the history of science as historically intertwined phenomena. For this reason, it has attracted staff, PhD candidates and postdoctoral researchers from many countries, and functions as an international hub for scholars interested in the combination of the history of philosophy and the history of science. In addition to addressing academic peers, CHPS also reaches out to a wider audience to contribute to a better understanding of the historical trajectory that has led to today's science and technology-driven society.

The members of CHPS publish the journal Early Science and Medicine and the book series Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy and Science. The largest collective project includes the edition of Buridan's commentary on Aristotle's Physics. Other projects address issues as diverse as the relation between the faculty of imagination and scientific image-formation, the effect of Einstein's relativity theory on the philosophy of time in the 1920s and 1930s, Francis Bacon's matter theory, and the development of psychology during the Renaissance.

The Faculty of Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies is a compact, ambitious organisation with approximately 160 staff and nearly 900 students from the Netherlands and abroad. Our educational programme includes several top-notch degree programmes in both in-depth disciplinary fields of study and interdisciplinary and interfaculty studies. The faculty has innovative education and research programmes with a strong focus on current social issues.

• Letter of motivation.
• CV including two names of possible referees.
• Academic transcript with courses followed and grades obtained.
• A representative writing sample.