Jens Pier

I am an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London. My work focuses on the nature of human self-consciousness and on the limits of what our minds can grasp and our words can say. I draw from the Kantian, post-Kantian, and Wittgensteinian traditions.

My current main research project investigates the ways in which subjectivity is realized socially, and the alienation and distortion to which it is thereby vulnerable. Another central focus of my research is how self-consciousness informs metaphysics and philosophical methodology.

Other interests of mine include the prospects of idealism in metaphysics and epistemology, the meaning of skepticism, epistemic injustice, the philosophy of death, and the history of philosophy from the 19th century onwards.

Before joining Royal Holloway, I completed my Ph.D. at the University of Leipzig after doctoral research in Leipzig and at St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. Before that, my B.A. and M.A. studies took me to the Universities of Bonn, California (Berkeley), and Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne).