Filosofie ( research )

In Social and Political Philosophy you study 'the political' as an essential but conflict-ridden aspect of the human condition, and politics as a way of coping with this.

Social and political philosophy is part of a practical philosophy that aims for fundamental questions regarding human society: What is a political order? How do institutions come into being? What are the differences between a community and a society? In what type of society should we live? What is justice? What is the relation between morality and politics? In Nijmegen we pay a lot of attention to interpreting, problematising and actualising classical texts that are part of the European political philosophy - from Plato to Habermas. At the same time we focus on actual discussions on the crisis and conceptualisation of democracy. Also important are studies concerning spacial and metaphorical imaginations (city, garden, desert) in core political philosophical texts. Regarding these different fields our research in Nijmegen does not only want to take a descriptive perspective; we offer a normative perspective as well.

In History of Philosophy you explore the development of natural philosophy and metaphysics from the late Middle Ages to early modern and modern times.

Exploring the development of philosophy from Antiquity to early modern and modern times, with a particular emphasis on the genesis of modern scientific disciplines such as psychology, physics or chemistry out of the traditional body of Aristotelian natural philosophy. There is no other academic discipline in which the past is so important as in philosophy: today's philosophers are still responding to, and conversing with, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. For this reason, the philosophy curriculum at Radboud University consists of a great number of historical courses. The specialisation History of Philosophy covers the entire history of philosophy from the Presocratic philosophers up to today, divided into four periods: ancient, medieval, modern and contemporary. Key authors for this specialisation are, in alphabetical order, Aristotle, Descartes, Epicurus, Galileo, German idealists, Hegel, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, Lucretius, Merleau-Ponty, Plato, Pomponazzi, Sartre, and Thomas Aquinas.

In Philosophy of Mind and Science you study problems such as mental causation and phenomenal consciousness from the viewpoint of neurophenomenenology and the embodied embedded cognition paradigm.

Philosophy of mind and cognition touches on some of the most profound questions about ourselves: What is it to have a mind? How is our mind realized by our brain? What is consciousness? How can our mental states drive our actions? Do we have free will? What is that makes (most) human beings persons? Traditionally philosophy of mind is part of the analytical tradition in philosophy. Recently, however, a more phenomenological approach to typical questions in the philosophy of mind has provided a refreshing new look on old topics. Also, the advance of cognitive neuroscience is leaving its trace in the way old questions are posed and answered. Philosophy of Mind and Cognition in Nijmegen combines traditional analytical theorizing with insights from phenomenology and the empirical sciences.