Since Ruhr-University Bochum considers itself a cosmopolitan and international university, Internationalization is anchored in its mission statement "Built to change" and integrated as a strategic cross-cutting issue in all areas of the university. This page offers an overview of various measures to this effect in our faculty, ordered according to the different relevant fields of action.
Our faculty welcomes international students!
Our faculty features a New Joint Master's Programme on Superdiversity in Education, Organizations, and Society (SEOS), offered by eight world-class European universities, and addressing graduates of Education, Social Sciences and/or Management who want to analyse and shape European superdiverse societies' transition to an inclusive, productive, and sustainable future. Applications are open until 1 June, 2025! More Information here.
We offer various English-speaking Master study programs in Philosophy.
First of all, students can study the MA in Philosophy with a Focus: Theoretical Philosophy, covering all topics in this branch of philosophy. A slightly different focus characterizes our MA in History and Philosophy of Science and Logic, where the focus areas are set more narrowly.
A complementary offer, targeting students with a stronger interest in Practical Philosophy, is our international and interdisciplinary MA in Ethics - Economics, Law, and Politics. This MA program is offered in collaboration with the faculties of Law, Economics, and Social Science.
Finally, our curriculum in Theoretical Philosophy feeds into the interdisciplinary MA in Cognitive Science, anchored in the Faculty of Psychology.
Further Information:
We maintain an extensive network of collaborations with Philosophy Departments across Europe. The Erasmus study exchange programme offers a variety of possibilities for our students to study abroad, enter different cultures and learning environments, and strengthen their language skills. We constantly extend our network, e.g., in 2025 to include ELT Budapest (Hungary), University of Lodz (Poland), and NOVA University in Lisbon (Portugal). Please consult our Philosophers' Unit Study Page for further information and links to scholarships beyond the Erasmus program.
In cooperation with the funding agency DAAD, Prof. Luigi Caranti (University of Catania) holds an International Guest Professorship and teaches in our EELP MA program. He worked as visiting researcher in various international institutions including the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia University and at the Australian National University.
His area of specialization is the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, but his broader expertise includes the philosophical theory of human rights, democratic peace theory, and contemporary political theory with a special emphasis on distributive justice. A recent field of interest concerns the ethical and political problems surrounding the digital revolution.
Further information here.
For the academic years 2025-2027, the DAAD has granted Prof. Tobias Schlicht an International Guest Professorship "Philosophy of Cognitive Science". Starting in the winter term 2025-26, four excellent international researchers will offer courses in our English language MA programs, open for students in Psychology, Cognitive Science, and Philosophy.
We look forward to welcoming Profs. Robert Clowes (NOVA Lisbon), Nico Orlandi (UC Santa Cruz), Robert Rupert (University of Colorado, Boulder), and Kristin Andrews (York University/CUNY New York) at RUB!
Furher inquiries by E-mail to Tobias Schlicht (tobias.schlicht@rub.de).
International Senior Fellows
Prof. Kathryn Temple (George Town University, Washington DC) will be a Senior Fellow at the College for Social Sciences and Humanities (University Alliance Ruhr) in spring 2026. She will collaborate with tandem partner Prof. Eva Weber-Guskar as she completes her current book project: “Ambivalence: Law, Culture, and the Invention of a Modern Emotion”. Prof. Temple is interested in further interdisciplinary collaborations on emotions in the fields of neuroscience, law, literary studies, and history.
Prof. Nico Orlandi (University of California, Santa Cruz) was Senior Research Fellow at the UA Ruhr College for Social Sciences and Humanities in 2025. They are working on a project on concepts - what they are and how we learn them - and draw on the history of philosophy and on contemporary research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and in computer science. Their Tandem Partner at the UA Ruhr is Prof. Tobias Schlicht. Further information.
Dr. Jonathan Najenson (Tel Aviv) is German-Isreali Minerva Fellow of the Max Planck Society, hosted by the chair for Philosophy of Language and Cognition (Prof. Werning). He is working on a research project on Navigating Memory: The role of simulation in spaital memory with the aim of integrating imagination and cognitive maps. The central hypothesis is that remembering places is a type of goal-driven spatial simulation where one imagines likely places to visit to fulfill goals.
Humboldt Fellows and Awardees
Our faculty has hosted many Humboldt Fellows on a regular basis over the years. Among them, one Anneliese Maier Awardee, Prof. Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis), several Humboldt Research Award winners, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Awardees, and Postdoctoral Fellows. We are striving to enlarge our rich network of Humboldt Awardees and invite reseachers to approach us for new partnerships.
From 2020 to 2026, former Humboldt Research Awardee Prof. Graham Priest (Boyce Gibson Professor Emeritus, University of Melbourne, Distinguished Professor, Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Chair Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Shandong University) has been appointed as International Research Fellow at RUB. He collaborates with Prof. Heinrich Wansing and the Logic in Bochum group. His research is focused on non-classical logic, especially paraconsistent logic, and on dialetheism, the view that there exist true contradictions.
Hegel Archive
The Hegel Archive is housed by our faculty and features regular international visiting researchers. Current visitors in the summer term 2025 are Prof. Brady Bowman (Pennsylvania State), Dr. Alessandro de Cesaris (Fribourg), Silvia Locatelli, MA (Lisbon), and Giuseppe Vacca, MA (Bari). Further information about research and editing projects at the Archive here.
International Annual Lecture Series
Since 2007, our faculty presents the Rudolf Carnap Lectures which have become a renowned annual event featuring outstanding philosophers and cognitive scientists. Each lecture series is accompanied by a workshop featuring early career researchers presenting their work in the philosophy of mind and cognition. Further information about the upcoming lectures, a list of past lecturers, and a gallery of snapshots from past events can be found here.
Bochum-Grenoble-Taipeh Memory Colloquium
Since 2020, researchers on memory from RUB collaborate with colleagues at the Center for the Philosophy of Memory at Université Grenoble Alpes and at the Department of Philosophy at NYCU Taipeh and organize a bi-weekly seminar series. Further inquiries to Prof. Markus Werning. As part of the collaboration with Grenoble, Juan Àlvarez, PhD will be a joint Postdoctoral Researcher at RUB and at Grenoble, working on a project on the dispositional nature of episodic memory, co-funded by Plan France 2030, Le Ministère de l'Économie, des Finances et de la Souveraineté Industrielle et Numérique de la République française.
Bochum-Tohoku Cooperation
From 2025-2030, Prof. Heinrich Wansing and International Research Fellow Prof. Graham Priest have been appointed as a Distinguished Professors at the Graduate School of Information Sciences of Tohoku University, Japan where they co-operate with Professor Hitoshi Omori, former Sofja-Kovalevskaja research group leader at RUB (2018-2023), funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The newly established collaboration concerns the field of philosophical logic and encompasses, for example, contra-classical logics, including systems of connexive logic.
Bochum-Rutgers
Since 2016, the Faculty of Philosophy and Educational Research at RUB and the Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University (USA) have established an official partnership which includes annual workshops in Bochum and New Jersey and exchange of researchers on all academic levels, PhD students and Postdoctoral Researchers in particular.
tba
General support for international researchers and students is provided by
Copyright © fakultaet 2025
Letzte Änderung: 07. Okt. 2025
