Job Market Candidates 2025/26
Trinity’s philosophy doctoral graduates are entering the job market with strong research profiles, shaped by a department with a wide range of philosophical expertise. Below you will find profiles of our current candidates, including their thesis titles, supervisors, examiners, and research interests.
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My research lies at the intersection of early modern, Irish, and comparative philosophy, with a particular focus on causation and pragmatism.
Job Market Candidate
Takaharu Oda
- Thesis title | A Pragmatic Bishop: George Berkeley's Theory of Causation in De motu
- Supervisors | Kenny Pearce, Alison Fernandes
- Viva Examiners | Lisa Downing (Ohio State University), Jim Levine (TCD)
- Educational Background | Ph.D. in Philosophy, Provost's Scholar | Trinity College Dublin | 2018–2022.
Research
My research lies at the intersection of early modern, Irish, and comparative philosophy, with a particular focus on causation and pragmatism.
My doctoral thesis argued that George Berkeley's theory of causation in De motu (1721) is best understood through a pragmatic lens—a reading I continue to develop in my forthcoming monograph, A Pragmatist Bishop: Berkeley's Philosophy of Causation (Brill). Berkeley occupies pride of place in my research not only as a pivotal figure in Irish philosophy and the broader early modern tradition, but also as an unexpected point of contact between Western pragmatism and Eastern thought.
A second strand of my work pursues comparative philosophy across Chinese Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and Japanese aesthetic traditions, with a view to pragmatism. This project is currently supported by a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Research Youth Fund of the Ministry of Education, P.R. China (25YJC720002). Drawing on thinkers such as Laozi, Sengzhao, Zhu Shunshui, and Toshihiko Izutsu, I explore how non-Western philosophical frameworks illuminate—and are in turn illuminated by—early modern European questions about causation, time, perception, and language. I am especially interested in pragmatist methods, before and after C.S. Peirce, that can serve as a bridge between these traditions. With collaborators, since 2024, I have thus launched an academic association, Asian Pragmatism Network.
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My area of specialisation is in metaphysics, primarily on topics to do with alethic modality (necessity, possibility, contingency).
Job Market Candidate
Enda Russell
- Thesis title | The Inconstancy of Modal Discourse
- Supervisors | John Divers
- Educational Background | MPhil. Philosophy | Trinity College Dublin | 2022
Research
My area of specialisation is in metaphysics, primarily on topics to do with alethic modality (necessity, possibility, contingency). My dissertation addresses whether the occurrence of modal idioms in scientific discourse involves commitment to a substantive realism about modality (an analogous question is familiar in meta-ethics: whether ordinary, truth-apt moral discourse involves a commitment to moral realism).
I am interested in most areas of philosophy, but my preferred areas of competence are: general philosophy of science; philosophy of language; the history of philosophy (esp. Kant, Wittgenstein, Quine); and philosophical logic.