Introduction

I started to teach at the Department in 2003 and was appointed as Associate Professor in 2015. I received my PhD at the University of Göttingen/Germany in 2005 with a dissertation on the critique of religions in Early Modern European philosophy. As participant in the Humboldt Fellowship Programme, I worked as associate researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Freie Universität Berlin in 2006-2007. At the Department of Philosophy of the University of Szeged I hold general lectures on Mediaeval and Renaissance philosophy and special seminars on philosophical problems of the Scholastic, Renaissance and Early Modern period as well as of contemporary ethics.

Research profile

My research activity is devoted to Scholastic, Renaissance and Early Modern philosophies, with a special emphasis on the possible connections between the Middle Ages and Early Modernity (epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of religion). This essentially implies the central role of the philosophies of Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas, Machiavell and Descartes, and relating them to Aristotle’s, Plotinus’, Spinoza’s and Pufendorf’s thought. Most recently, some of my publications focus on the history of Natural Law Thinking in the 17^th century, including the thought of Suárez, Grotius, Hobbes and Pufendorf. Beside these topics of the general European history of philosophy, I pay attention to local phenomena as well. I am the leader of the research group “The History of Hungarian Philosophy in Early Modern Period (1570-1720”; the project aims at delivering interpretations of philosophical texts that had emerged within the Hungarian (or wider East European) cultural context of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.

Publications:

https://m2.mtmt.hu/gui2/?type=authors&mode=browse&sel=authors10002204

https://www.humboldt-foundation.de/vernetzen/recherche-im-humboldt-netzwerk/einzelansicht/1120144/dr-jozsef-simon