Job Market Candidates 2026/27

Haktan Akcin

• Thesis title | Naturalized Metaphysics After Theory Change: Toward a Historically Disciplined Metaphysical Naturalism
• Supervisors | Alison Fernandes

Research

My research lies at the intersection of philosophy of science and metaphysics, with particular interests in scientific realism, scientific theory change, structural realism, naturalized metaphysics, and modality. My doctoral research examines how a genuinely science-informed metaphysics can accommodate the historical fact that even successful scientific theories and their associated ontologies are subject to substantial change.

A central problem motivating my PhD is the tension between naturalized metaphysics and the pessimistic meta-induction from the history of science. If metaphysical inquiry is to take its lead from our best scientific theories, what justifies metaphysical commitment when those theories may later be replaced? I develop a structural realist response to this problem, arguing that continuity across scientific theory change is often found not at the level of particular theoretical entities or ontologies, but in structures retained across successive theories. I further investigate the modal character of such structures and develop a form of modal structuralism as a basis for a historically informed naturalized metaphysics.

My future research will continue to develop the philosophical questions pursued in my doctoral work, particularly those concerning structural realism, naturalized metaphysics, modality, and the relationship between scientific theory change and metaphysical commitment. Alongside this continuing work, I also intend to extend my research on scientific theory change beyond the physical sciences and into the historical sciences, particularly archaeology.

I am especially interested in changes in our understanding of the Neolithic brought about by recent archaeological research in Anatolia. Çatalhöyük provides an especially rich example of the familiar association between the Neolithic and settled agricultural communities, in which sedentary life, subsistence practices, increasingly elaborate forms of social organisation, and a complex symbolic world are closely interconnected. The recent evidence from Göbekli Tepe, however, complicates aspects of this picture: its monumental architecture and evidence of large-scale collective and ritual activity emerged in communities that do not fit neatly into a developmental sequence in which settled agriculture precedes such forms of monumentality and social coordination.

I am interested in identifying more precisely which elements of earlier accounts of Neolithisation are challenged, revised, or retained in light of evidence from Göbekli Tepe and related sites, and in examining this episode as a case of scientific theory change. Through further training and research in archaeology, I aim to acquire the domain-specific expertise required to investigate these developments from within archaeological practice itself, while incorporating them into my broader philosophical research programme on scientific realism, continuity and discontinuity across theory change, and the prospects for a naturalized metaphysics grounded in scientific practice.

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Simone Nota

• Thesis title | Transcendentalism without Idealism: An Essay on Kant and Wittgenstein
• Supervisors | James Levine

Research

In my main research, I focus on transcendental philosophy—that is, on every philosophical outlook that aims at recognizing necessary conditions for the possibility of our cognition, insofar as they are known a priori.

My concern with transcendental philosophy is born out of a fascination with the problem of the possibility of metaphysics. Traditionally, metaphysics has been conceived as a systematic investigation aimed at a priori knowledge of the nature and status of reality. But can we ever attain such knowledge? And, if so, under what conditions?

I address these questions through the critical lenses of both Kant and Wittgenstein, distinguishing transcendental philosophy from transcendental idealism, namely the metaphysical doctrine whereby the necessary features of empirical reality are  known a priori to depend upon our human point of view. Indeed, I argue that by investigating from our point of view the necessary conditions of our cognition, we may attain an understanding of ourselves, which need not be (mis)construed in metaphysical terms. An understanding of metaphysics is not yet a metaphysical understanding.

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Sam Fazekas

• Thesis title | Hannah Arendt’s Unwritten Theory of Political Judgment
• Supervisors | Lilian Alweiss
• Educational Background | Ph.D. in Philosophy | Trinity College Dublin | 2023.

Research

Dr. Samantha Fazekas is a Teaching Fellow in Political Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin. She completed her Ph.D. in philosophy at TCD in 2023 (without revisions). Her research interests are in political and moral philosophy, Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy (esp. Hannah Arendt).

My thesis has been published as a book (Samantha Fazekas, Hannah Arendt's Unwritten Chapter on Judging, Boston/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2025). It develops a new reading of Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic reflective judgment. I justify Arendt’s claim that she brings Kant’s unwritten political philosophy to fruition by appropriating reflective judgment as a model for political judgment. The novelty of this claim is that it situates reflective judgment in Arendt’s political thought – without compromising the integrity of Kant’s aesthetics or Arendt’s conception of politics. By developing an Arendtian phenomenology of privacy, I offer a new reading of Arendt’s public-private distinction. It has the potential to square the formality of reflective judgment with the publicity and worldliness of political judgment.

I have published in Works of Philosophy and Their Reception (2024), Phenomenological Reviews (2025), Amor Mundi (2025), Internationale Politische Theorie (2025), and HannahArendt.net (forthcoming 2026).

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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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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.

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