Leonhard Menges

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Zurich is recruiting two postdoctoral researchers for the SNSF-funded projects Shining Light on Praise and The Social Power of Praise . The projects sit at the intersection of moral philosophy and experimental philosophy, examining the nature, mechanisms, and social impact of moral praise. The Zurich positions are dedicated to empirical and experimental research. Postdoctoral researchers will conduct high-quality research on moral praise, co-author articles for leading international peer-reviewed journals, and contribute to international conferences, workshops, and project events. The work may engage with moral responsibility, praise and blame, social cognition, moral psychology, philosophy of language, pragmatics, feminist philosophy, oppression, epistemic injustice, social norms, and experimental linguistics. Researchers will work closely with Prof. Dr. Pascale Willemsen and the Zurich project team, as well as with Prof. Dr. Leonhard Menges and collaborators at the University of Salzburg. The teams share research questions, collaborate on publications, and meet online or in person, providing an international and interdisciplinary research environment. Potential approaches include linguistic inference, cancellability and projection tests, economic games such as dictator or ultimatum games, corpus-based and computational methods, and quantitative analysis using R or Python. The appointments are pure research positions with dedicated research time and no mandatory teaching duties, based at the Department of Philosophy in Zurich.