J.E. de Jong

Bio / cv

I am assistant professor in Continental Philosophy at Leiden University. After BA and Research MA degrees in philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, I earned a PhD there in 2015 (all cum laude). I taught at the UvA until 2016, and was an assistant professor in the History of Modern Philosophy and Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University, before coming to Leiden in 2019.

I am also a postdoc researcher in the project Nietzsche – Experiment en Nihilisme at the Radboud University in Nijmegen (supervised by prof. dr. Paul van Tongeren and prof dr. Gert-Jan van der Heiden).

Research and Teaching

My teaching and research is in 19th- and 20th-century Continental philosophy, which for me always also means to be engaged in a dialogue with the history of philosophy broadly.

One of my enduring interests is what it means to think, in the double sense of (1) how to think or to think well (with what method, what kind of writing or style or logic), and I am especially interested in forms of thought that deviate from what might conventionally be considered theory; and (2) conceptions of why or for what we think, whether there is a need or task or responsibility of philosophy, and how to conceive of it.