Federico Boccaccini

Biography and/or project

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher (Chargé de recherches) at the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.- FNRS) and a Junior Research Fellow associated to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liege. I joined the department in 2011 as a Euraxess Postdoctoral Researcher after my Ph.D. in Paris at the Sorbonne University. I was Academic Visitor for the Trinity Term 2013 to the Power Structuralism Project (ERC), Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
I mainly work in history of late modern philosophy, with focus on the rise of phenomenology and analytic philosophy, and their intersection with early scientific psychology and history of metaphysics (esp. Aristotelian tradition). Also, much of my work has focused on the legacy and impact of early modern philosophy of mind on the 19th and 20th-century philosophy. I received a grant support from F.R.S.- FNRS for my project ACME (2014-2017) on the history of mental acts.

My work is inspired by the idea that history of philosophy need not be isolated in time, and recent contemporary philosophers should not be ahistorical. I founded an interdisciplinary group on the philosophy of history, supported by FNRS, in order to exchange ideas among scholars about methodology and epistemology of writing history of Western thought (including history of science and intellectual history) displayed in particular on the topics of truth and narrativity, epistemic value of history, historical knowledge and consciousness.