Job Market Candidates 2025/26

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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