Dr W.W.H. Cornelissen (Wout)
Assistant professor - Philosophy of Law
Montessorilaan 10
NIJMEGEN
Postbus 9049
6500 KK NIJMEGEN
Wout Cornelissen is appointed as Assistant Professor (tenured) of Philosophy of Law.
His research is devoted to the critical-philosophical reflection on:
(i) the meaning, origins, and adequacy of the concepts we use in order to understand legal, political, and social phenomena and answer legal, political, and social questions;
(ii) the nature, foundations, and history of this form of reflection.
He is co-editor of the new, critical edition of Hannah Arendt's The Life of the Mind, on thinking, willing, and judging, which has been published in April 2024 (see ‘Projects’).
In his teaching he focuses, among other topics, on the philosophy of international migration law and on the philosophical question of (dis)obedience to the law. Previously, he taught courses in philosophy of law, political philosophy, and their histories, phenomenology, existential philosophy, and Critical Theory, and philosophies of labor and work.
In the summer semester of 2022 he served as visiting professor in the history of philosophy in the Institute for Philosophy of the FU Berlin, where he was previously appointed as a wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter (DFG). Earlier he was Research Assistant Professor of German and Lecturer in Philosophy and Political Science at Vanderbilt University, postdoctoral researcher (NWO) in the Department of Philosophy of Utrecht University, Hannah Arendt Center Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities at Bard College, and Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy of Law at VU Amsterdam.
He holds a doctorate from the Institute for Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities of Leiden University. His dissertation was devoted to a critical examination of the relation between philosophy and politics. For the purpose of this research, he spent one term as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago. He studied philosophy at Radboud University, with philosophy of law as major and political philosophy and ancient philosophy as minors.