Doctoral Researchers

Scroll down to find out about the current doctoral researchers of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy. Alumni are listed here.

Supervised by Arno Böhler

Eva-Maria Aigner is a PhD candidate at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, and DOC-fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She is currently working on her PhD project "Surviving Derrida/ Derrida Überleben" on the notion of "survivance" in deconstruction, especially Derrida. Her research interests include deconstruction, contemporary French thought, Derrida studies, feminist deconstruction and theory, poststructuralism, philosophy of literature and writing. 

Mark Nader Basafa

Supervised by Christian Damböck

Mark's research project explores the genesis of Kuhn's conception of scientific progress in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions against the backdrop of historicism in France and Germany. He is particularly interested in the landscape and the ideas advanced on scientific philosophy by German and French neo-Kantians during the first half of the 20th century.

Supervised by Johann Schelkshorn

Leonhard Bauer studied Philosophy and Theology in Vienna, his research focuses on the subjects of normativity, argumentation, and justification. With his doctoral dissertation, "Beyond Justification/Jenseits von Rechtfertigung" he aims to deepen our understanding of the nature of justification and moral judgment from both practical and epistemological points of view. Using an analytical approach to the semantics of justification, he proposes a new perspective on the issue of final justification and radical skepticism. He is co-founder of the online platform "Systematische Offenheit" and the "Paul Feyerabend Gesellschaft."

Philipp Leon Bauer

Supervised by Friedrich Stadler

Philipp Leon Bauer, BA MA has studied philosophy with particular interest and specialisation in history of science and philosophy of science at the University of Vienna and University of Leipzig. Bauer is writing his doctoral thesis on Ernst Mach's concept of thought economy and the influence towards the Vienna Circle. In the scope of his doctoral thesis, close cooperation with Prof. Ingolf Max at the University of Leipzig has been established.  

Supervised by Hans Bernhard Schmid and Herwig Grimm

As part of the 'Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections' (FoNTI) scheme, Jessica D. Bicking's dissertation project explores the conditions of interdisciplinary research into (normative) mind-phenomena. Here, she is looking at work done on social cognition in individuals on the autism spectrum as a case, and as a basis for discussing the potential that phenomenological concepts may hold for a science of cognition.

Supervised by Angela Kallhoff

Michael Boch

Supervised by Kurt Appel, in close collaboration with Alexander Schnell (University of Wuppertal)

Michael Boch studied philosophy, history and educational sciences in Münster. In 2020 he obtained an MA in philosophy with a thesis about Martin Heidegger's theory of space and orientation. Boch is writing his doctoral thesis about Johann Gottlieb Fichte's idea of a transcendental logic of knowledge and its reception by Herrmann Krings. He is CEO of the archive for Post-Neokantanism and contemporary criticial idealism at the University Wuppertal.

Okwuegbu Bartholomew Chidi

Supervised by Michael Staudigl and Delia Belleri

Okwuegbu Bartholomew Chidi did his masters degree in philosophy at the University of Vienna (2021) focusing on gender and race theories. For his doctoral studies, he is narrowing his research scope to the theory of race within the areas of phenomenology and analytic philosophy. His research interest is to contribute a broad-based, coherent and balanced understanding of “Race” as well as engender a better understanding of its operative mode in the different spheres of the society.

Cristina Chițu

Supervised by Arno Böhler and George Karamanolis

Cristina Chițu's research project, tentatively titled "Return of the Cosmic Return: The Cyclical Character of Ancient Cosmologies", seeks to outline a dialogue between the Greek Stoics and the Hindu Shruti and Smriti texts in order to explore  the image of a repetitive death and (re)birth of the cosmos, as well as whether this image is compatible with that of a repetitive death and (re)birth of time. These ancient philosophies are then compared with recent developments in theoretical physics so as to suggest their relevance to the natural sciences today.

Ivana Covic

Supervised by Arno Böhler

In Ivana’s research, central points of interest revolve around bringing together art, bioethics and philosophy of mind (biopoetics), with focus on the mind-body problem, role of artistic research in knowledge acquisition, bioethics of artificial intelligence and animal ethics.

Supervised by Angela Kallhoff

Maike Cram studied philosophy in Berlin before settling in Vienna, where she now focuses on the concept of human dignity from a phenomenological perspective. Her PhD project aims to enrich our idea of human dignity by analysing the structure of experiencing self-respect. From this perspective, self-respect will be analysed as existential feeling on the one hand and as posture, with special emphasis on how social and political dimensions shape our sense of dignity, on the other hand. 

Supervised by Martin Kusch

Chiara Dankl studied philosophy, political science and ethics in Salzburg and Vienna and is now a PhD researcher at the department of philosophy. She also studies psychotherapy science at the Sigmund Freud University, Vienna and is a psychotherapist in training under supervision. Her master’s thesis explored depression in relation to contemporary forms of power and as a type of modern subjectivation. Her doctoral research focusses more broadly on mental illnesses in relation to power structures and normativity and on the epistemic limits of thinking about oneself in psychological terms.

Supervised by Max Kölbel and Esther Ramharter

Felix Danowski started his PhD in 2018, as a member of the FWF funded project 'Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections' (FoNTI). His dissertation focuses on Metaethical Non-cognitivism and its implications for Moral Epistemology. Accordingly, his topics of interest are mainly Metaethics, Epistemology, and Action Theory. Since 2018, he is also a member of the Vienna Forum for Analytic Philosophy (WFAP). 

Konstantin Deininger

Supervised by Herwig Grimm

Konstantin studied at LMU Munich and the Munich School of Philosophy. He is a guest researcher at the Messerli Research Institute, University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, since October 2020. His research focuses on the problems of human-animal interactions and concepts that play a crucial role in it, such as the notion of the fellow creature. Methodologically, Konstantin is located in Wittgensteinian ethics as championed by Cora Diamond, who defends a practice-oriented moral philosophy.

Supervised by Hans Bernhard Schmid

Ding Yushan is a visiting PhD candidate from Wuhan University, China. She has a strong interest in moral philosophy, and now she is trying to figure out what is morality, what is the difference between ethics and science,and how we could defend for a moral theory. In her dissertation, she is going to defend for a kind of moral universalism.

Arianna Dini

Supervised by Mark Coeckelbergh

Arianna Dini is a PhD candidate at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, and the Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium (FINO). Her project, "The Political Economy of Algorithmic Pricing" explores the ethical problems arising within consumer-to-platform internet commerce, and aims to propose regulatory solutions. Her research interests include theories of property, just price theory, marginalism, market freedom, exploitation, privacy, and internet regulation. 

Dagmar Dotting

Supervised by Georg Stenger

Bishakha Dutta

Supervised by George Karamanolis

Bishakha Dutta is a PhD candidate at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna. She is currently working on a PhD project that studies the economic concepts laid out by Cicero in his work De Officiis vis-à-vis the views of the Stoics on private property. Bishakha Dutta has a strong interest in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, History of Philosophy and the Ancient languages - Ancient Greek and Latin. 

Supervised by Max Kölbel

Triinu Eesmaa started her PhD in 2018 and works on philosophy of language. Her PhD research focuses on context-sensitivity and vagueness. In her dissertation, she deals with the question how to accommodate underdetermination involved in language use within semantic and pragmatic theories.

Supervised by Angela Kallhoff and Herwig Grimm

Sarah Espinosa started her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Vienna in 2018, as a member of the FWF-funded project 'Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections' (FoNTI). Her field of research is Environmental Philosophy and Climate Ethics more broadly. Her work focuses particularly on resource rights, property theory, different conceptions of value regarding scarce resources, matters of social and environmental justice, particularly in the global south.

Supervised by Max Kölbel and Hans Bernhard Schmid

Tom's research is on epistemology and the ethics of beliefs. He is part of the FWF funded project 'Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections' (FoNTI). He is interested in how evidential and non-evidential considerations interact when it comes to the question of what one ought to believe.

Stephan Fock

Supervised by Georg Stenger and Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch

Stephan Fock is a psychoanalyst, PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Vienna, and scientific staff member of the Department of Psychology & Psychodynamics, Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences, Krems. His thesis investigates psychoanalytic object relations theory from a perspective of philosophy of science, in particular its basic concepts like self and object representation, and their relations to philosophical and empirical theories of subjective experience and embodiment.

Supervised by Mark Coeckelbergh and Mark H. Bickhard

As part of the FoNTI Project, Arzu’s research is on ethics of social interaction with robots from a cognitive scientific perspective. More information about her research and academic roles can be found here and here.

Supervised by Arno Böhler

Ralf Gisinger is a DOC-Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and works at the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, with a PhD-thesis on philosophy of nature and ecology in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari as well as contemporary discourses on ecology. His main research interests include political/social philosophy, poststructuralism, materialism(s), critical theory. He recently finished a project on philosophies of pluralization (“Philosophien der Pluralisierung”).

Paul Gragl

Supervised by Violetta Waibel

Paul Gragl started his PhD in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 2019, focusing on Kant's philosophy of law and its significance for today's relationship between law and politics. His research focuses on the law of reason and the reason of law; their significance for understanding freedom and human rights; the triangular relationship between freedom, the positive law, and politics; and how these concepts translate into a modern constitutional republican-democratic concept of the State.

Hafiz Muhammad Hammad Mushtaq

Supervised by Mona Singer

Hammad Mushtaq's research is focused on the critical evaluation of the narratives at work in the debates about the companion robots, in the tradition of philosophy of technology. The variables he is working with include the politics of relation-ing - in terms of love, friendship, and companionship - among the terrestrials, technological solutionism and the activity of Terra, and the relationship between technology and evolution.

Henriikka Hannula

Supervised by Martin Kusch

Henriikka Hannula works on the history of late 19th-century German philosophy. In her dissertation, she is researching the concepts of historicism, naturalism and Lebensphilosophie in the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey. Besides that, her interests lie in the philosophy of the social sciences, the philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. 

Georg Harfensteller

Supervised by Georg Stenger

Georg Harfensteller is interested in embodied, performative and pre-reflexive forms of communitarisation and the resulting shared agency. He tries to develop a social-phenomenological approach to religious and political gatherings as a starting point for a descriptive analysis of group formation beyond the mediated content. The experience of the self and other, the structure and prerequisites of interaction, as well as shared pathos and response, are the cornerstones of the analysis. 

Supervised by Mona Singer

Christoph Hubatschke was a DOC-Fellow of the Austrian Academy of Science and a visiting research fellow at the Department for Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University, London, for his PhD project on the philosophy of technology in the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, especially on the political aspects of such a philosophy of technology. His research focuses on the work of Deleuze/Guattari, philosophy of technology, critical political theory, new technologies and social movements.

Supervised by Donata Romizi, Tamara Katschnig and Maria Tulis-Oswald

Andreas Höller is creating an interdisciplinary approach for the Philosophy for/with children (P4wC) movement. It attempts to add new perspectives to the main questions in the P4wC discourse: first, can P4wC actually be called philosophy?; second, do children have the cognitive abilities to engage in philosophical discourse? Furthermore, the comparability of scientific studies on the issue is complicated by the diversity of various P4wC concepts. Using his interdisciplinary Polylogical Process model of (Elementary-)Philosophical Education (PPEE) as a linking model could lead into a better comparability of international studies by paving the way for more constructive criticism in the long run.

Supervised by Arno Böhler

Eva Jägle writes her PhD about Deleuze's thinking on other philosophers in the context of his film-books. The research is inspired by her interdisciplinary interest in art and its possibilities of expression. Her dissertation will follow Deleuze into his cinematographic vision of other thoughts.

Roman Jordan

Supervised by Christian Damböck

Roman Otto Jordan's main area of interest is the field of philosophy of science ­— in his doctoral thesis he investigates the theories of science of Wolfgang Stegmüller and Paul Lorenzen. He has also been interested in the evolutionary epistemology of Rupert Riedl and the philosophy of physics of Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. He was also project worker to Christian Damböck at the Institute Vienna Circle for FWF projects about the diaries of Rudolf Carnap.

Nikolina Kamzola

Supervised by George Karamanolis

Nikolina Kamzola studied classics (BA), philosophy (MSc) and Science-Technology-Society (MSc) at the University of Athens, Greece. Her PhD project aims to investigate the Epicurean views on language, specifically on the origin of language as well as on sense and meaning. Her research will bring pieces of ancient sources together, reconstruct the puzzle and connect this topic with contemporary theories of language.

Kanau Kobayashi

Supervised by Georg Stenger

Kanau Kobayashi studied Philosophy, Anthropology and Literature in Tokyo and in Freiburg. His PhD project focuses on the psychoanalytic approach to the foundational moment of the law and the institution. Especially based on Pierre Legendre’s work of dogmatic anthropology, he tries to sharpen the aesthetic, performative and unconscious dimension of the law through its subject-constituting function.

Supervised by Tarja Knuuttila

Rami Koskinen is working on his PhD on modalities in synthetic biology as part of the ERC group Possible Life: The Philosophical Significance of Extending Biology. Besides modal reasoning, he is interested in general philosophy of science, philosophy of biology and logic. Before coming to Vienna, Koskinen studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Helsinki.

Supervised by Tarja Knuuttila.

Moritz Kriegleder is a cognitive scientist and physicist interested in computational models of consciousness. In his PhD project, he studies how current mathematical theories of cognition such as predictive processing and free energy try to explain qualities of subjective experience. His interests are philosophy of scientific modeling, phenomenology, and embodied cognition.

Supervised by Hans Bernhard Schmid

Odin Kröger has been studying philosophy in Vienna, Berlin, Canberra, and Boston. He mainly works on social metaphysics, the philosophy of the social sciences, and critical theory, but he also has a soft spot for formal theories. His PhD is about what it is for us to reify our social order.

Rodrigo Lagos

Supervised by Mona Singer

Supervised by Angela Kallhoff

Eva Liedauer works as an assistant at the Chair of Ethics and Applied Ethics. After completing her MA with a thesis on Hannah Arendt's account of judgment, she is pursuing a PhD on the tensions between political action and the social in Arendt's work. Eva aims to revisit Arendt's critique of modernity in the light of theories of money. In addition to her research interests in money and politics, Eva is also keenly interested in environmental philosophy and ethics. 

Li Xiao

Supervised by Benjamin Schnieder

Li Xiao is interested in metaphysics and the philosophy of language. His research project explores the nature of structures by investigating their theoretical roles and recommends a metaphysical picture of them that explains their general features. He is also interested in a wide range of topics like mereology, intrinsicality, modality, grounding, meta-ontological deflationism, aboutness, negation, and Kant’s philosophy.

Erich Linder

Supervised by Herwig Grimm

Erich Linder studied in Padova, Berlin, Milan and is currently guest researcher at the Messerli Research Institute. Drawing from pragmatism and phenomenology his research focuses on the problem of injustice in utilitarianism applied within the context of animal research.

Supervised by Martin Kusch

Flora Löffelmann's research encompasses ideas from both queer phenomenology and social/ political epistemology. In their PhD thesis, they focus on how epistemic injustice is experienced at a first-personal, phenomenal level, and highlight the potential for action and agency that arises from being a body "out of place". 

Rojin Mazouji

Supervised by Violetta Waibel

Previously working on ethics and philosophy of religion in Kant and Kierkegaard, currently Rojin Mazouji is working on the philosophy of Fichte and self-knowledge. The next project concentrates on the concept of embodiment in German Idealism and how this discussion reflects some central issues in the debate of gender inequality and feminism.

Eusebius Nkwagu

Supervised by Michael Staudigl

Eusebius Nkwagu did his Masters in Philosophy at the University of Vienna and is writing his doctoral thesis on how Emmanuel Levinas' ethical phenomenology of the other can be translated into our concrete relations with the other and may be capable of awakening a sense of responsibility where these relations indulge in reciprocal inauthenticity, indifference, or morally petrified normative social orders.

Balázs Ónya

Supervised by Benjamin Schnieder

Balázs Ónya brought BA and MA degrees in philosophy from the University of Pécs (Hungary) and is currently a student at the Doctoral School of Philosophy of the University of Pécs as well as a visiting researcher at the VDP.  In his doctoral research, he investigates how different interpretations of social kinds can be paired with certain beliefs regarding theories of truth. He also explores the modern emergence of the separation of natural and social kinds and its philosophical and ideological background.

Supervised by Georg Schiemer and Esther Ramharter

Gareth R. Pearce's doctoral research is on the philosophical foundations of axiom selection. In particular, Gareth argues that debates surrounding axiom selection for mathematics are highly theory non-neutral with respect to wider questions in the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics. Gareth has been a committee member of the Vienna Forum for Analytic Philosophy (WFAP) since 2019 and is currently a VDP Steering Committee member.

Supervised by Martin Kusch

Supervised by Kurt Walter Zeidler

Lois Marie Rendl's main research interests are transcendental logic and idealism. From 2015 to 2019 (with interruptions) he was research assistant to Christian Damböck at the Institute Vienna Circle (FWF project: edition of the diaries of Rudolf Carnap 1908-1935). The topic of his PhD project (to be submitted in autumn 2021) is "Idealism and Logic of Science. The Transcendental Interpretation of Aristotelian Syllogistics by Charles S. Peirce, Hegel and Hermann Cohen".  

Supervised by Martin Kusch

Sonja Riegler's research interests focus on social, feminist and political epistemology, particularly in relation to theories of epistemic oppression. In her thesis, she investigates causes for and effects of forms of ignorance on epistemic communities. She puts special emphasis on the repressive epistemic and political dimension of ignorance and aims to provide strategies to counteract harmful instances of ignorance.  

Irene M. Salzmann

Supervised by Martin Kusch and Dietlind Hüchtker

Irene M. Salzmann's research focuses on social/political epistemology and history of ideas. In her PhD project she adopts a a queer-feminist and post-marxist approach into works of the Konservative Revolution with a special interest in their leitmotif of nature.

Supervised by Angela Kallhoff and Felix Pinkert

Jackson Sawatzky’s research occurs at the intersection of social contract theory, normative ethics, and (especially) the history of philosophical thought. By applying the techniques of analytic philosophy to contemporary variants of social contract theory, his doctoral dissertation asserts a contract-theoretical understanding of systemic oppression and social injustice.

Philipp Schaller

Supervised by Violetta Waibel

Philipp Schaller is working in his thesis on the rivalry that is taking place between reasoning and story-telling over the precedence in founding morals and in establishing a moral attitude in human beings. He is focusing on the works of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schiller and Fyodor Dostoevsky, following the line of reception linking these three authors.

Moritz Schwab

Supervised by Violetta Waibel

Supervised by George Karamanolis

Thomas Seissl is a fellow of the uni:docs programme and member of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Currently, he is working on his dissertation project exploring the reception of Aristotle's account of time in Physics IV.10-14 in late antiquity. Thomas Seissl has strong interests in Ancient natural philosophy, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. 

Supervised by Martin Kusch and Michael Staudigl

Manu Sharma is a PhD Researcher at the University of Vienna. Before this, they completed their M.A. in Philosophy from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Their research concerns itself with modernity and the ways modernity (mis)reads the phenomenon of suffering. As philosophical practice, they work on texts, archives that remain buried under hegemonic epistemic erasure and approaches them deconstructively to say some things about suffering in modernity, or modernity’s (in)ability to understand, confront and address certain forms of suffering. While much of their literature comes from post-colonial landscapes, they methodologically work at the intersections of critical phenomenology, post-structuralism and de-colonial theory to investigate the phenomenon of suffering. They find much joy in indulging in art, literature, poetry, music and the like.

Supervised by Richard Heinrich

Mira Magdalena Sickinger's project “The Pragmatics of Deep Jokes” explores “depth” as an attribute that can be ascribed to certain philosophical problems as well as certain jokes. It reviews Wittgenstein’s description of “deep jokes” and seeks to provide a definition for this particular type of joke, which is not primarily aimed at amusement but displays communicative dysfunctionalities or misinterpretations of (and by) language. The investigation discusses how jokes violate traditional maxims of successful communication and analyses the pragmatic particularities that apply to deep jokes.

Martin Strauss

Supervised by Elisabeth Nemeth

Supervised by Richard Heinrich

Michael Toppel is working on his PhD on the use of geometry in the metaphysics and magical theory of Marsilio Ficino in comparison to the scholastics. Besides medieval natural philosophy, he is interested in proof theory, syntactical theory reconstruction, medieval logic and general philosophy of logic. Before starting his PhD in Vienna, he studied mathematics, logic and philosophy of science in Vienna and Leeds. He already has a PhD in mathematical logic from the University of Leeds.

Supervised by Angela Kallhoff

In her PhD-thesis, Lisa Tragbar investigates the international responsibility for peacekeeping in the ius post bellum. She approaches the subject based on Francisco de Vitoria's considerations of international law. Her research interests lie in Political Philosophy and Applied Ethics, in particular Just War Theory and Peace Ethics.

Thesis Advisory Committee: Hans Bernhard Schmid, Georg Stenger, Violetta Waibel

Florian Uckmann studied philosophy, sociology and aesthetics in Jena and Frankfurt/Main before starting his PhD within the 'Forms of Normativity: Transitions and Intersections‘ scheme. The main focus of his research lies in the fields of anthropology, social philosophy and the ontology of society with particular interest in social institutions, second nature and the theoretical foundations of liberalism.

Supervised by Esther Ramharter and Georg Schiemer

Simon Weisgerber studied philosophy (MA) and mathematics (BSc, MSc) at Saarland University, Germany. He started his PhD in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 2018, as a member of the FWF funded project 'Forms of Normativity - Transitions and Intersections' (FoNTI). Simon works on philosophy and mathematics and, in his dissertation, he focuses on topics such as what is mathematical progress, or issues concerning mathematical revolutions.