Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships Emergence Project (EXPIRED)

Salary: £30,424 - £36,298 (Grade 7)

Applications are invited for two postdoctoral research fellowships in the Department of Philosophy, to work on the Durham Emergence Project, a major interdisciplinary research initiative based in the Departments of Philosophy and Physics at Durham University, funded by the John Templeton Foundation. The project aims to examine and critically evaluate recent developments in the philosophy and science of emergence.

Emergence, or dependent novelty, is of increasing interest to scientists and philosophers as a way of characterising relationships between complex entities and their parts, relationships between the sciences, and the place of the mind in the physical world. Weak emergence, which is uncontroversial, concerns knowledge of the world, or our description of it: unpredictability, or the applicability of new concepts. Strong emergence involves novelty in the world itself: new properties or objects, laws or causal powers. There is no agreement whether any cases of strong emergence exist, what would count as cases, or whether their existence is even a coherent possibility. The project will critically examine conceptions of strong emergence, and the philosophical arguments and scientific evidence for and against its existence.

Members of the project team are:

Philosophy of Mind: Dr. Sophie Gibb, Professor Jonathan Lowe, Professor Nick Zangwill

Philosophy of Science: Professor Nancy Cartwright, Dr. Robin Hendry, Dr. Peter Vickers

Physics: Professor Stewart Clark, Professor Tom McLeish, Dr. Tom Lancaster

The project will bring together philosophers and physicists in seminars, workshops, summer schools and a final conference to discuss strong emergence. It will provide opportunities for early-career scholars to contribute to the emergence debate through postdoctoral positions, PhD studentships and a competitive call for research proposals. Philosophical work on the definition of emergence, and its application within the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science, will be accompanied by scientific work on candidate cases of emergence in condensed matter physics.

Applications are particularly welcome from women and black and minority ethnic candidates, who are under-represented in academic posts in the University.

Reference Number: 2628                  

Closing Date: 26 May 2013