Faculty of Philosophy
Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has enjoyed an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative centre of higher education offering high-quality teaching and research. Balanced study and career paths in a wide variety of disciplines encourage the 31,000 students and researchers to develop their own individual talents. Belonging to the best research universities in Europe and joining forces with prestigious partner universities and networks, the University of Groningen is truly an international place of knowledge.
The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Groningen is a vibrant, international community of excellent researchers and teachers. It consistently receives the highest evaluations both for research and for teaching among philosophy departments in The Netherlands. The Faculty has three departments: History of Philosophy, Theoretical Philosophy, and Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy. For more information about the Faculty and the department and its members, see:
www.rug.nl/filosofie/organization/
In the department History of Philosophy, we are looking for applications for two fully funded PhD positions in Philosophy and Digital Humanities starting 1 May 2019. The successful candidates will work with Dr Andrea Sangiacomo and his team on the ERC-funded project The Normalisation of Natural Philosophy for a period of four years. Further details about this project are available below.
ERC Starting Grant: “The normalisation of natural philosophy: How teaching practices shaped the evolution of early modern science” (NaturalPhilosophy - 801653)
Project outline
Early modern natural philosophy underwent dramatic transformations that completely reshaped its conceptual framework and set of practices. The main contention of this ERC project is that teaching practices had a decisive and ‘normalising’ impact on the progressive dissemination, adaptation and selection of rival conceptions of natural philosophy. Normalisation occurs when historical actors collectively present certain tenets as crucial for the study of a discipline, and thus prescribe them as a necessary subject for teaching and learning.
The overall aim of this ERC project is to determine and explain how the process of normalisation embedded in teaching practices shaped the evolution of early modern natural philosophy. To study normalisation, it is necessary to operate a systematic comparative investigation of hundreds of works through which natural philosophy was taught, learned and reshaped, both within and outside universities. The size of this corpus defies the traditional method of close reading used by historians of philosophy and science.
This project will meet this challenge by organically integrating close reading with digital ‘distant reading’. The project will digitally transcribe a corpus of approximately 500 early modern works on natural philosophy, published in Britain, France and the Dutch Republic. Using digital tools to investigate how the networks of authors and concepts of natural philosophy co-evolved over time will allow the project team to identify textual excerpts that are representative of historical trends. By analysing these excerpts with close reading and assessing them against the digital results, it will be possible to determine and explain how normalisation shaped the evolution of natural philosophy.
This project aims to boost the integration of digital approaches in the history of philosophy and science by producing a newly digitised corpus, tools customized for analysing early modern texts, and methodological reflections on their implementation.
We offer two 4-year PhD positions in the context of the ERC Starting Grant Natural Philosophy. The two PhD candidates will work on two related but independent sub-projects (see description below) and will be an integral part of the project team.