Research Fellow in Philosophy of Mind and Language (EXPIRED)

This post arises from the European Research Council funded project, “The Nature of Representation”. This project is led by Professor Robert Williams (School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds).

This project examines the explanatory role, metaphysics and epistemology of mental and linguistic representation. What is the relation between representational facts (the meanings of words, the truth conditions of sentences, the content of mental states) and non-representational facts such as causality, teleology and behaviour? On what basis can we form justified beliefs about what words mean, and the content of mental states of agents? And for which explanatory projects (if any) do we need to invoke representational facts?

You will have a completed PhD by the start date of the post (1 August/September 2015 in Philosophy or an allied discipline. You will be expected to pursue independent work related to the overall project theme and to work as a research assistant to the Principal Investigator (PI). Working as part of a team, you will be expected to be involved in planning and running collaborative activities of the project group (project meetings, annual workshops and a capstone international conference), as well as some administrative work associated with the project.

You will be based at the University of Leeds and will be expected to take an active role in the overall research life and culture of the department.

As part of the application process, please can you upload a writing sample. This should reflect your current research interests; it does not need to have been already accepted for publication and should preferably be no longer than 10,000 words. You will also need to provide a description of your proposed research during the 2 year post (max 1000 words).

We welcome applications from everyone irrespective of gender and ethnic group but, as women and members of ethnic minority groups are currently under-represented at this level of post, we would encourage applications from members of these groups.  Appointment will be based on merit alone.