Aloisia Moser
Visit: 2021-2022
Discipline: Ancient Philosophy
Project Title: On Guessing
I am an Assistant Professor of the History of Philosophy at the Catholic Private University in Linz (Austria). I earned an M.A. in Linguistics and German Literature from the University of Vienna (Austria) and hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the New School for Social Research (NY; USA). After my Ph.D. I was Visiting Scholar in the Rhetoric Department at University of California, Berkeley in 2013 as well as Lecturer in the Philosophy Department in 2014. In 2015 I was a Fellow at the Analytic German Idealism Wissenschaftskolleg in Leipzig, Germany. The main areas of my research are philosophy of language and mind, thought systematically and historically. My book “Kant, Wittgenstein and the Performativity of Thought” was just published with Palgrave Macmillan (2021).
Project Description: In my current research project, I continue to investigate the act of thinking, focusing on what I call the moment of guessing. I argue that guessing needs to be part of every act of thinking for us to be able to think anything new. I locate this moment of guessing in ancient thought as well as in thinkers at the beginning of modern science and in Kant and develop it systematically to yield a philosophical account of guessing. At the History of Philosophy Forum, I will focus my research on Plato and the man(t)ic art as well as the notion of eikasia, both possible places to locate guessing.