As I’ve hinted in passing before, the second visit abroad in the remit of my Academy of Finland, 3-year postdoc project is about to begin. Last spring I worked at NYU with Kit Fine — a visit which I documented in my NYU Diaries — next spring I will be a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My sponsor there is Laurie Paul. I will be in Chapel Hill for the whole spring semester, and in fact I’m not coming back to Finland before July 2012.

Now that all the practical matters regarding my visit (such a J-1 visa) are more or less sorted, I thought it’s time to announce it here more officially. I’m heading to the US already on December 27, to attend the Eastern APA meeting (my very first), and I’m planning to spend the New Year in NYC, before a looong train journey down south to Durham, NC. It’s a rather strange coincidence that I will be living in the vicinity of Durham, given that I spent five years in Durham, UK! Chapel Hill and Durham are right next to each other, the latter being the bigger city of the two, and home to Duke University, which also has an excellent philosophy department.

At Chapel Hill I’m of course most interested in L. A. Paul’s work; of particular interest to me is her work on essentialism, such as ‘The Context of Essence’ and ‘In Defense of Essentialism’, but she has written extensively on topics such as composition and causation as well. There are plenty of other good philosophers at Chapel Hill of course, and I look forward to the opportunity to work with Thomas Hofweber and Marc Lange, among others.

As to my own research plans while I’m at Chapel Hill, at first I hope to continue and perfect my work on the epistemology of essence and the foundations of modality which I began at NYU last spring. Other topics that I have in mind are a novel account of (neo-)Aristotelian essentialism, and a critical look at the role of quantificational questions in metaphysics. I already have engagements on a few topics in the form of invited presentations and papers as well, including substance causation, the categorization of reality, and Aristotelian metaphysics.

Looks like it’s going to be a busy spring! I do of course hope to do plenty of running while I’m there too — as I understand the climate in North Carolina and the surroundings of Chapel Hill should be pretty good for that. I’ve got a lovely (huge!) house secured for the first three months of my visit, after that I will sort something out. I also have a number of presentations booked (and to be confirmed) for the spring already, listed below with provisional topics:

• January 12: ‘On the Very Idea of Substance Causation’, Indeterminism Ltd Kickoff Workshop, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.
• February 13: ‘The Epistemology of Essence’, Departmental Seminar, UNC Chapel Hill.
• March 30: ‘Quantification and Ontological Realism’, Departmental Colloquium, Duke University.
• April 4: ‘(Neo-)Aristotelian Essentialism’, Work-in-Progress Seminar, University of Colorado at Boulder.

I will announce further speaking engagements as they are confirmed. I do also plan to document my visit in the form of blog posts similar to my NYU Diaries, so stay tuned!