Last year’s post on “Too Much to Blog” still rings true: I’m overcommitted and far too busy doing things to write about what they are. Yet, I did write four posts in August and September as a Featured Early Career Author on the Philosophers’ Cocoon:

My schedule got really messed up this fall due to a change in deadlines. For years the deadline for the ERC Starting Grants had been in February, this year it was anticipated by four months to November. Since I was planning to submit an NWO VIDI grant with a deadline in October, this led to a huge clash in my planning. In the end I didn’t manage to complete my Starting Grant and only submitted the VIDI. I’ll be receiving the referee reports at the end of January / beginning of February.

I hadn’t given many talks yet this year, but that completely changed in the last two months: in the space of three weeks I gave no less than six presentations and one guest class:

  • November 24 I organized and spoke at the fourth workshop of the “Philosophy around 1900” OZSW working group in Utrecht.
  • November 27-28 I was invited to speak at the Ehrenfels Symposium in Graz, on “Die Gestalten und das Gestalten der Welt”, my first talk in German (though it was announced in English).
  • November 30-December 1 I participated in the first meeting of the Brentano Research Network organized by Guillaume Frechette in Salzburg.
  • December 8 I was in Oxford for the Ada Lovelace Workshop, and gave a presentation comparing Lovelace’s and Descartes’ views on Thinking Machines.
  • December 11-12 I took part in the annual OZSW conference in Amsterdam, with “The Mechanization of Consciousness in the 19th Century”.
  • December 16 I gave a paper at the History of Philosophy colloquium in Utrecht on “Brentano against Kant: The Critique of the Synthetic a priori in the School of Brentano”.
  • In between, on December 14 I gave a guest class in the course on modern philosophy in the Education for the Elderly HOVO program on Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”.

All in all it has been a very busy year and I’m quite happy with what I’ve achieved in 2015. I organized a major three day conference on “Philosophy as Science” with Paul Ziche and held two workshops in the context of the OZSW working group on “Philosophy around 1900”. I published quite a few articles that I am really proud of:

  • “A Letter from Edmund Husserl to Franz Brentano from 29 XII 1889”, the unknown letter I found at the Houghton Library in Harvard last year, which I also made available here in original and in translation.
  • The entry on “Christian von Ehrenfels” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy together with Robin Rollinger.
  • “Carl Stumpf’s Philosophy of Mathematics” in Philosophy from an Empirical Standpoint: Essays on Carl Stumpf, edited by Denis Fisette and Riccardo Martinelli
  • “Improper Intentions of Ambiguous Objects: Sketching a New Approach to Brentano’s Intentionality” in Brentano Studien XIII (dowload the final draft)

Most importantly, however, new plans were made. Besides my own VIDI grant application, together with some of the participants at my own conference and those at the first meeting of the Brentano Research network, we are going to submit a COST Action. The biggest task for 2016 is going to be to find funding or a position when my current VENI grant runs out. If I don’t get the VIDI, I’ll revise and resubmit it in October 2016, but then I’ll have to wait nearly a full year before I can start. Alternatively, I could try the Starting Grant again, if I can get an extension for parental leave. Otherwise I would have to look for a temporary position or fellowship, such as a Humboldt Fellowship. Anyway, 2016 is going to be a very interesting year. Best wishes!

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