Developing empirically informed and practice-oriented philosophy in Central and Eastern Europe: The INCET model

Tomasz Żuradzki, Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics (INCET),
Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, [email protected]

This article is licensed under a https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

The Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics (INCET), established at the Jagiellonian University in 2007 by Włodzimierz Galewicz, combined from the outset philosophical inquiry with a strong orientation toward practical problems, especially in bioethics and research ethics, while aspiring to close cooperation with medical and health professionals. This idea—that philosophy should engage directly with real-world problems—remains central to how we understand our work.
When I became Head of INCET in Autumn 2016, my aim was to build on this foundation while opening the Centre to international collaboration and to a broader range of topics and methods. The ERC-funded BIOUNCERTAINTY project, which I received in 2019, was an important turning point: It allowed us to expand both thematically and methodologically. Today, INCET researchers and PhD students work not only in bioethics and research ethics (including metascience), but also in moral psychology, experimental philosophy, philosophy of science—especially philosophy of medicine—as well as legal theory and public policy. At the same time, we combine traditional philosophical “armchair” methods with empirical approaches such as behavioural experiments, corpus analysis, and topic modelling.
A good illustration of the intellectual profile of the Centre is the diversity of our current research projects. These include my ERC-funded BIOUNCERTAINTY project on ethical decision-making under risk and uncertainty, experimental approaches to legal and moral responsibility (experimental jurisprudence, conducted by dr Piotr Bystranowski), and work in political philosophy on the understanding of privilege (led by dr Giulio Fornaroli). Additional current projects address reproductive technologies and medical aid-in-dying practices. Forthcoming projects extend this work in several directions: they examine memory biases and epistemic responsibility, develop a perspectival account of certainty within hinge epistemology and its role in polarization and epistemic injustice, and investigate—through combined empirical and philosophical approaches—the conceptual and normative issues related to the determination of death. INCET functions less as a thematically unified centre than as a platform for integrating philosophical inquiry with empirical research, with a strong emphasis on addressing practically relevant problems in healthcare, law, and public policy.

Bioethics meets philosophy of science
One theme that I find particularly important is the connection between bioethics and philosophy of science, explored in our conference “Bioethics Meets Philosophy of Science” organized in 2022 and many papers published. Our assumption was that many problems in contemporary biomedicine depend simultaneously on normative assumptions and on questions concerning evidence, classification, explanation, and scientific uncertainty. For example, in a recent paper I co-authored (“Ethno-racial categorisations for biomedical studies: the fair selection of research participants and population stratification”), we critically examine the widespread requirement to use ethno-racial categories in biomedical research, arguing that such stratification lacks both epistemic and normative justification when it is not grounded in prior mechanistic hypotheses, and may instead lead to spurious generalisations and methodologically distorted inferences. Similar concerns motivated our study of the relationship between bioethics and the biosciences in the paper “Discussions on Human Enhancement Meet Science: A Quantitative Analysis” (I co-authored it with Piotr Bystranowski and Vilius Dranseika). Using large-scale citation and topic analysis, we showed that discussions of human enhancement often rely more heavily on speculative “science-fictional” scenarios than on actual developments in the biosciences, despite frequent references to scientific literature.
This illustrates a broader challenge for contemporary bioethics and philosophy of science: remaining genuinely connected to scientific practice in an era of increasing specialisation. Meaningful engagement with empirical research increasingly requires at least basic literacy in statistics, experimental design, and computational methods. Yet many philosophy departments—including in Central and Eastern Europe—still treat empirical engagement as secondary, while institutional evaluation systems often reward traditional single-author work more strongly than interdisciplinary collaboration.

Apply or perish
A defining feature of INCET is that it is funded almost solely through external grants. This creates both opportunities and structural challenges. On the one hand, grant-based funding gives us flexibility and makes it possible to attract international researchers. On the other hand, it requires constant work on new applications and means that we cannot offer stable long-term positions, although some of our former researchers have subsequently obtained tenure-track positions at the Institute of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University. Moreover, heavy reliance on external grants has its hidden costs: it can fragment research agendas into short-term, fundable projects and shift attention toward topics aligned with funding priorities rather than those driven purely by theoretical importance.
The Polish research environment is shaped mainly by the grant system of the National Science Centre (NCN), which has introduced relatively transparent and internationalised standards of evaluation but operates under conditions of chronic underfunding. Success rates in some calls fall below 10 percent, while application and reporting procedures have become increasingly bureaucratic. As a result, researchers funded through these schemes often have to combine scientific work with substantial organisational and administrative responsibilities. At INCET, we address this constraint by providing targeted administrative support and structured feedback at key stages of grant preparation and project development.
These structural problems become particularly visible in the case of large international projects. When I received my ERC grant, the Institute of Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University refused to provide administrative support for the project, despite receiving the associated indirect costs. This experience partly motivated me to develop INCET as a centre capable of offering the kind of organisational support that remains rare in many institutions in the region.

Symbolic academic geography: East looks West
In recent years, we have hosted at INCET researchers from China, Germany, India, Italy, Lithuania, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States, who have either conducted their own projects at the Centre or joined us as postdoctoral fellows. At the same time, relatively few applicants have come from Central and Eastern Europe itself. This came as a surprise to me, and I think it reflects a broader problem of symbolic academic geography: many researchers from the region still look primarily toward Western Europe or the United States, and rarely consider other Central and Eastern European countries as potential destinations for their careers. This often leads them to overlook the fact that some centres in the region are scientifically highly sophisticated and intellectually dynamic. Paradoxically, scholars from Western countries sometimes evaluate research centres in Eastern Europe more positively than we evaluate ourselves.
I think this imbalance should also be addressed more consciously in conference organisation and international academic networks. Just as gender balance among keynote speakers is now widely recognised as important, greater geographical diversity should also be encouraged. If a conference has four keynote speakers from Europe, at least one could come from Central or Eastern Europe. This would not only broaden intellectual perspectives, but also strengthen academic integration within Europe.

Thinking globally, working in local contexts
INCET is not defined by a narrow regional specialisation. Philosophy, including philosophy of science, is inherently global, and most of our work addresses general theoretical problems. At the same time, local contexts can serve as analytically valuable entry points, revealing conceptual and normative tensions that extend far beyond Poland or Central and Eastern Europe.
In my own work, for example, some research questions were directly inspired by developments in Polish law and medical ethics, in particular the verdict of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal concerning the conscience clause. The debate was further shaped by the position of the Supreme Medical Council, which argued that “it is not known why a physician should justify his worldview in writing,” a claim that led me to critically oppose this view (see my publication: “Conscientious Objection in Healthcare: The Requirement of Justification, the Moral Threshold, and Military Refusals”). Although this research arose from a specific national context, it functions primarily as a case study for analysing more general problems concerning conscientious objection, justification, and professional ethics.
As a Centre, we also try to connect academic philosophy with wider public and scientific debates. We are involved in the journal Diametros (where I serve as an associate editor), a peer-reviewed, open-access journal founded in 2004 that publishes work in all areas of philosophy both in Polish and English and is indexed in major international databases such as Scopus and Web of Science. INCET publishes the popular science journal Philosophy in Practice (Filozofia w Praktyce), of which I am editor-in-chief, and which I deliberately run in Polish in order to engage more directly with local public discourse and make philosophical reflection accessible beyond the international academic community. I also encourage researchers at INCET to engage more actively in the popularisation of philosophy and science through public-facing essays or contributions to international platforms such as Daily Nous and Retraction Watch where INCET researchers have already published.
We also organise regular international events, including the recent workshops  Incentivised Experiments in Normative Systems (organized by Piotr Bystranowski, 25–27 May 2026) and a meeting of the Nordic-Baltic Network for Philosophy of Medicine (organized by Vilius Dranseika, 4–5 June 2026).


From early ideas to final grant applications
At the moment, we are particularly inviting candidates to apply for the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowships with INCET as the host institution (September 2026 call). We are also open to other funding programmes. Our preselection process is demanding: candidates are asked to submit a short expression of interest (one page), a CV, and a sample publication. We then support projects at all stages—from early ideas to final grant applications. We place strong emphasis not only on high-quality administrative assistance during the application process (provided by our research support officer, Ewa Chudoba, who holds a PhD in philosophy), but also on substantial feedback both before submission and during the conduct of the project. This includes, for example, weekly research seminars in which we present and discuss our work in a constructive and supportive environment. This creates conditions that are often stronger than those available in larger but more rigid institutions. As a result, our success rates in national and international competitions are very high.
These results are particularly notable given the limited Polish participation in international schemes. Out of 1,610 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships funded in 2026, only five are hosted in Poland; among 9,847 Seal of Excellence projects, only 68 are affiliated with Polish institutions, including three from INCET. This means that our centre alone accounts for around 5% of all Polish successes in this category.
An important advantage of applying with a host institution in Poland—and more broadly in Central and Eastern Europe—is access to funding mechanisms for so-called “Widening Countries.” MSCA proposals not funded in the main competition are automatically considered for ERA Fellowships, and projects awarded the Seal of Excellence can receive support through national programmes such as the NAWA Ulam Programme. In the most recent edition of MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships call, we obtained three such awards, with three new postdoctoral researchers expected to join INCET in 2027. We also offer short visiting fellowships for those interested in applying with us.

References
Żuradzki, T., Bystranowski, P. & Dranseika, V. Discussions on Human Enhancement Meet Science: A Quantitative Analysis. Science and Engineering Ethics 31, 6 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-025-00531-6
Żuradzki, T., Malinowska, J.K. Ethno-racial categorisations for biomedical studies: the fair selection of research participants and population stratification. Synthese 204, 130 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-024-04769-8   
Żuradzki, T. (2024), Conscientious Objection in Healthcare: The Requirement of Justification, the Moral Threshold, and Military Refusals. Journal of Religious Ethics, 52: 133-155. https://doi.org/10.1111/jore.12451

Published: 16/05/2026
Modified: 02/06/2026 (CC license, links to workshops and meetings; references)