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The Department of Philosophy is home to a dynamic group of postdoctoral researchers supported by various prestigious fellowships. These fellowships provide early-career scholars with the opportunity to pursue independent research and make meaningful contributions to the field of philosophy.
The Irish Research Council
The Irish Research Council (IRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship Programme is a highly regarded national initiative that supports early-career researchers across all disciplines. The fellowship provides scholars with the resources and independence to explore innovative ideas and approaches in their research.
Prospective postdoctoral fellows are encouraged to reach out to Professor John Divers, or to potential mentors within the department to discuss their research ideas and the possibility of support for IRC postdoctoral projects.
Pablo Magaña Fernández | IRC Postdoctoral Fellow 2024 - 2026
Pablo is an IRC Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Philosophy Department in TCD. Before that, he was a postdoc researcher at NOVA University of Lisbon, under the "Present Democracy for Future Generations" research project (2023).
He obtained a PhD in Law at Pompeu Fabra University in 2022, and was a PhD visiting researcher at the Catholic University of Louvain's Hoover Chair.
His work focuses on the political inclusion of non-standard subjects (such as animals and future generations), and on the democratisation of non-standard decision-making sites (such as the workplace). In his research project, he draws on the values that best justify democracy (such as autonomy, interests-protection, fairness, or relational equality), and inspects how - if at all - these values give us reasons to represent animals and the unborn.
He also plans to explore whether there is a principled way to distinguish decision-making sites that should be democratically arranged (such as the state) from those which, inutitively at least, seems permissible to arrange otherwise (for instance, a local golf association), and uses the discussion to shed light on harder cases (such as the workplace or organised religion).
Caleb Althorpe | IRC Postdoctoral Fellow 2023 - 2025
Caleb is an IRC Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at TCD. He received a PhD in Politics from Western University in 2023.
He does research in contemporary political theory and political philosophy. In particular, economic justice and the political theory of work, theories of justice more broadly, and political liberalism. He is currently undertaking a book project on meaningful work and theories of justice.
His work has been published or is forthcoming in venues such as: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, and Social Theory and Practice.
Clare Moriarty | IRC Postdoctoral Fellow 2022 - 2025
Clare is an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at at Trinity College Dublin. Her current project is focused on mathematics and philosophy in the 18th century. Recent publications concentrate on the work of George Berkeley, Isaac Newton, Colin Maclaurin and Oliver Byrne. She is particularly interested in the application of mathematical methods to non-mathematical domains and reactions to/against such applications.
Her research is strongly interdisciplinary and in addition to writing about mathematics and philosophy, she is interested in the use of visual arts and speculative fiction to pursue philosophical and mathematical ends. She strongly believes in public-facing research and try to produce popular writings on her research topics whenever possible, for example in History Ireland, The Irish Times and for research archive blogs. For five years she held a Fellowship in Public Philosophy at The Forum for Philosophy.
She became a mother in 2020 and has recently been applying philosophical analysis in popular and academic writings on the ethics of the rhetoric around baby feeding.
Jonas Raab | IRC Postdoc Fellow, 2022 - 2024
Jonas was an IRC Postdoctoral Fellow in philosophy at TCD from 2022 - 2024.
Prior to his move to Dublin, he completed a PhD in philosophy at the University of Manchester (2017-2021), after receiving a Master of Arts in Logic and Philosophy of Science from the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) (2015-2017) and a Magister Artium in Philosophy, Mathematics, and Statistics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (2007-2014).
He works on several topics within mainly theoretical philosophy. Currently, his main topics fall within metametaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of logic, and the history of analytic philosophy. In particular, he is working on ontological commitment, explication, and modelling. He also has interests in philosophical methods (e.g., progess in philosophy, intuitions), ancient philosophy (in particular Aristotle and late Plato), formal philosophy of science (e.g., Dutch books, problem of old evidence), and logic (e.g., Quantified Argument Calculus).
Giulio Di Basilio | IRC Postdoc Fellow, 2019 - 2021
Giulio was an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin from 2019-2021.
He completed his PhD in Philosophy at University College Dublin in 2019. He specialises in Ancient Philosophy, with a particular emphasis on Aristotle’s Ethics, though he maintains a broad interest in the ethical reflection in antiquity as a whole.
His current project focuses on Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics, which he attempts to consider as a self-standing ethical work in its own right.
Margaret Hampson | IRC Postdoc Fellow, 2017 - 2019
Margret was an IRC Postdoctorate Fellow at TCD from 2017 - 2019.
Her research focuses on ancient ethics and moral psychology, and in particular the ethics and moral psychology of Aristotle. She is particularly interested in the topics of moral development and moral habituation - how we develop as moral beings and how such development is effected, in particular, through practical engagement in certain sorts of activities.
She is especially interested in the agential and interpersonal aspects of the developmental process, both of which seem to have an irreducible role in this process: what is it that the agential perspective affords a learner that is not offered by a non-agential or third-personal perspective? But what, also, do we learn from and in our interactions with others that we do not learn in isolation?