Prof.dr. Jos de Mul
Prof.dr. Jos de Mul (1956) is professor in Philosophical Anthropology and its History and head of the section Philosophy of Man and Culture. Moreover, he is the Scientific Director of the research institute 'Philosophy of Information and Communication Technology' (FICT). De Mul studied Philosophy in Utrecht and Amsterdam and in 1993 he obtained his PhD (cum laude) at the University of Nijmegen with a thesis in which he reconstructed Wilhelm Dilthey’s Kritik der historischen Vernunft (Critique of historical Reason). He has joined the Philosophy department of the Erasmus University Rotterdam since 1988.
De Mul’s research focuses on the (partly overlapping) domains of philosophical anthropology, philosophy of art and culture, and the philosophy of information and communication technologies. He has published nineteen books and more than hundred eighty contributions to edited books and articles in various scientific journals. He also contributes on regular basis to leading national quality newspapers in The Netherlands, such as de Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad. His work has been published and/or translated in more than twelve languages. Among his books are Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1999), The Tragedy of Finitude (Yale University Press, 2004), and Cyberspace Odyssey (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).
De Mul has been visiting professor at various international universities, such as the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2007-2008) and Fudan University in Shanghai (2008). He is member of the editorial board of many (inter)national journals and book series, and has been member and chair of various programme committees of the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) and international quality assessment committees. On a regular basis, he is a also referent for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), NWO and several foreign equivalents. From 2007 until 2010 De Mul was President of the International Association of Aesthetics (IAA) and from 2005 until 2011 he served as vice-president of the International Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft. So far, he has been quite successful in the acquisition of research funds (e.g. NWO, Australian Research Council, Cassirer Foundation, Dutch Foundation for Literature).
In Rotterdam, De Mul is leader of the research programme ‘Ontology of Mediation’. The programme, which started in the spring of 2004, aims at developing a topical ontology of mediation that will enable philosophers to analyze and interpret the various processes of mediatization in our present culture. From 2005 until 2010 In 2010 he supervised the NWO-research project ‘Playful Identities’ (2005-2010). The aim of this interdisciplinary (conceptual-philosophical, media-theoretical, and qualitative-empirical) program was to investigate to what extent and in what way, digital information and communication technologies are transforming the (construction of) personal and cultural identity.
In 2011 De Mul, together with five colleagues from Erasmus University, Utrecht University and Leiden University, started a large new NWO Horizon program with 7 PhD projects, a postdoc project and several senior researchers projects, entitled What can the humanities contribute to our practical self-understanding? (2011-2016). Within this project De Mul supervises two PhD projects and, together with Marcus Düwell, is responsible for the resulting synthetic monograph. So far De Mul supervised 19 successfully completed PhD theses, while 16 other PhD projects are running.
