Guidance on project themes

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Research supported by the New Generation Research Exchange programme should address Big Questions of universal human importance. We are especially interested in research into fundamental issues which straddle boundaries between disciplines including  philosophy, psychology, physical sciences, social sciences, theology, literature and cultural studies. For further guidance, please see the list of past topics below.

For enquiries about whether a given idea for a project would fall under the project themes, please contact mikolaj.slawkowski-rode@bfriars.ox.ac.uk.

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Selected past projects:

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• The rationality of the weakness of will and personality correlates of moral responsibility attribution.

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• Beyond psychology: Nietzsche and the metaphysics of agency.

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• What is it like to be another person? An attempt of an answer using object-oriented ontology of play.

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• Against determinism: an argument from (non-)locality.

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• The critique of rational theology: relation between belief and knowledge in epistemology of Immanuel Kant.

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• The argument from Integrity and the meaning of life.

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• The Catholic Church's response to the technocratic paradigm of the 20th-21st centuries.

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• Cognitive linguistics and the mind-body problem. A closer look into the conceptual metaphor mind-as-body.

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• Cosmopsychism in medieval female mystics.

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• The ontological commitments of morality.

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• Phenomenological notion of intentionality in the context of religious experiences.

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• Oedipus' hamartia revised: An inquiry into alternative explanations of his downfall from happiness to misfortune.

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• Are myths true? The polemics between Leszek Kołakowski and Marcin Król.

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• The cognitive view of habits & Epictetus's Callus analogy.

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• Homeric understanding of the soul in the context of contemporary theories.

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• The existentialist's challenge to naturalistic ethics.

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• From free theosophy to scientific-technological Prometheanism: exploring the context of the soviet space program.

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• Classical and neo-classical theist perspectives and science.

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• Theism and the deification of technology. 

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• The role of intellect in mystical knowledge: a comparative study of Abelard’s “Dialogus inter philosophum, judaeum et christianum” and Nicholas of Cusa’s “De pace fidei”.

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• Reasons-unresponsiveness: the problem of weakness of will and the consequences of psychologism.

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• Neo-Aristotelian ontological pluralism in light of contemporary natural sciences.

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• Epistemological contextualism: scepticism in a deontic space.

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• Are metaphors translatable? On universality and cultural variation.

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• Science does not think: the science-philosophy relationship in Heidegger.

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Applications are also welcome from researchers exploring Big Questions in the CEE context. Topics might include:

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• Do prevalent CEE intellectual traditions have a distinctive contribution to make to Big Questions?

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• What have major modern thinkers from CEE such as Leszek Kołakowski, Jan Patočka, Georges Florovsky contributed to our understanding of the human world?

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• Regional intellectual traditions such as Lublin Thomism developed partly as a challenge to the official Marxism of the communist period. Do they have continuing relevance?

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• What is the connection between promotion of “scientific atheism” by communist governments in CEE and the region’s distinctive religious vitality today?