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Funding Opportunities (MA & PhD)

Postgraduate Funding Opportunities

MA and PhD applicants are encouraged to explore funding opportunities both within UCD and through outside agencies. The information below relates to some of the more widely available funding sources, but is by no means exhaustive.

MA Funding Opportunities

The School of Philosophy has introduced an annual scholarship in memory of one of our MA students who passed away recently. Jean Hogan was an outstanding student who overcame very difficult personal circumstances to do the MA. The scholarship is open to anyone applying for an MA in Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Philosophy and Literature, Consciousness and Embodiment, Contemporary European Philosophy, Ethics: Theory and Practice. The scholarship is a fee waiver up to the value of EU fees of €10,100.

MA applicants who wish to be considered for this award will be asked to specify this in their personal statements submitted with their MA application.  The successful applicant will have an outstanding academic track record to date. The selection criterion for the scholarship will be the quality of this track record, determined by the information provided in the candidate’s application for the MA. Applications from candidates who have overcome difficult circumstances to pursue their studies are particularly welcomed.

Past Award Recipients
  • 2022: Conall Clarke
  • 2023: Sophie Foley
  • 2024: Not Awarded

Up to two competitive entrance awards ​of €1,000 may be offered to students who have been admitted to the UCD Philosophy MA Programme. 

One Scholarship is available for students applying to the MA in Philosophy (General Programme), with the commitment to write their MA dissertation on an aspect of the work or legacy of John Henry Newman. 

John Henry Newman (1801–1890) was a leading intellectual, religious thinker, philosopher and literary figure whose works include The Idea of a University (1852), An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), and Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman was the founder of the Catholic University of Ireland, that led to the establishment of University College Dublin. 

The scholarship will provide a significant contribution to the cost of tuition fees of €7,990 (minimum 50% and up to a possible 100%). Scholarships are open to Irish, EU and International applicants. The scholarships are endowed by the Newman Foundation. 

Once they have applied for an MA in Philosophy (General Programme), applicants are requested to email a brief description of their interest in Newman’s work and of their proposed dissertation project to (opens in a new window)philosophy@ucd.ie.

Past Scholarship Recipients
  • 2014: Nora Sullivan and Ulysses Ryan Flynn
  • 2015: Ross Ferrara and Christopher DuPee
  • 2017: Dhanya Raghavan and John Rogers
  • 2018: Paraskevi (Evi) Filea
  • 2019: Andrew Doyle, Cormac Duffy, Shane Hutchinson
  • 2020: Duane Michael Browne
  • 2023: Cathy Darling
  • 2024: Not Awarded

PhD Funding Opportunities

The School offers up to four PhD scholarships consisting of:

  • Fee remission of up to €7,130 per annum for four years subject to satisfactory progress each year
  • An entrance award of €2,000 for the academic year of entry only
  • Opportunities for teaching and research assistantships remunerated at the University’s hourly tutorial rate.

Deadline for PhD scholarship applications:

  • Monday 2nd June 2025 Non-EU Applicants
  • Monday 30th June 2025 for EU Applicants

Applicants will be informed of the decision by Friday 11th July 2025

Two of the (up to) four PhD scholarships are earmarked for work with (opens in a new window)Dr Tatjana von Solodkoff on the philosophy of fiction, including but not limited to the metaphysics of fictional characters, and (opens in a new window)Dr Keith Wilson for work in the philosophy of perception and the senses, including multi-sensory or non-visual perception, naïve realism and the metaphysics of experience; spatial and/or temporal experience; philosophy of psychology and cognitive science.

When applying for the PhD programme, applicants should state on their application that they wish to be considered for the Scholarships.

Past Award Recipients
Year Awardee Thesis Title  
2012 Martin Grünfeld 'Towards a Poetics of Knowledge: The Dominance of Scientific Writing and the Demolition of Thinking'  
2013 Asgeir Johannesson 'Rooted in Kant and Blessed by Wittgenstein: Philosophical Justifications for the Methods of the Austrian School of Economics'  
2014 Giulio Di Basilio 'The Notion of Prohairesis in Aristotle's Philosophy of Action'  
  David Markwell 'Merleau-Ponty's Ethics'  
2015 Muhannad Hariri 'Inferential Intuitions: The Role of the Imagination in Sellars' Theory of Experience'  
2016 Rana Bizri 'Understanding our Fundamental Ways of engaging with the World: Beyond Discursive Action'  
  Damien Lennon 'Eliot, Joyce and the Hermeneutic of Ruin'  
  Frida Trotter 'The connection between theory and nature. Wilfrid Sellars' analysis on language and perception'
  
2017 Antoine Athanassiadis 'Social Critique in Adorno and Foucault'    
  Liam Beggan 'Noam Chomsky’s early use of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Philosophy of Language'
  
  Holly Hartman

'Nothing About You is Alone'

  
2018 Sabrina Keenan

'The Experience of Aging'

  
  Jonathan Wren

'The Sharing of Being-with: The Political Hermeneutics of Hannah Arendt and Jean-Luc Nancy'

  
2019 Natalia Burakowska

'The Phenomenology of Dementia: An Embodied-Cognitive Account'

  
  August Buholzer 'Kantian Naturalism in Alois Riehl and Wilfrid Sellars'  
  Clémance Santemarie ‘The Aesthetic is Political’: A Critical Phenomenology of Social In/Visibility: Perception, Representation, the Imaginary'  
2020 Andrew Doyle 'On the Being of Philosophical Lecture'  
2021 Samuel Ferns 'Freedom, Knowledge and Power: Reflexive Stage in the Grammars of Critical Social Theory'  
  Miho Kaneko 'Can a Kind Essentialist Account of Instantiation Explain the Authorial Creation of Fictional Characters?'   
  Denise Kelly 'On Being (an Outsider): A Phenomenological Exploration of Social Phobia and Agoraphobia'   
  Aisling Phipps 'Parallels Between Personal Identity and Morality: The Effects of Identity Disturbance on Developing the Moral System in an Individual with Borderline Personality Disorder'   
2022 David Haack 'Phenomenology of Temperature'  
2023 Ranier Abengana 'The Future of Work and the Crisis of Critique: Resistance as a Condition of Possibility'  
  Natalija Cera 'Understanding Belonging in the Condition of Migration'  
  Borna Sucurovic 'Between Levinas and Derrida: Countersignature as a Thinking of the Other'  
  Philipp Wagenhals 'Critique and Experimentalism: Philosophy and Social Criticism after Adorno and Dewey'  
2024 Sophie Foley 'Health and Pathology as Tools of Social Critique'  
  Misha Goudsmit 'The Modal Space of Narrative'  
  Letizia Lochi  'What About Idealisation? How to Model Idealisation in a Theory of Non-Idealised Knowledge'  

Other Sources of Funding

UCD Global scholarships for:

  • international students
  • past UCD students who studied abroad in non-EU countries
  • students who graduated from member universities of Universitas 21
  • students from certain countries.

Contacts

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Gillian Johnston

School Manager | Graduate Administrator

Office:

Hours:

gillian.johnston@ucd.ie +353 1 716 8186
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Dr Elmar Unnsteinsson

Taught Graduate Coordinator

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Office:

elmar.unnsteinsson@ucd.ie
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Dr Tatjana von Solodkoff

Research Graduate Coordinator

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Office:

tatjana.vonsolodkoff@ucd.ie

UCD School of Philosophy

Room D501 (5th Floor), John Henry Newman Building, UCD Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland
T: +353 1 716 8186 | E: philosophy@ucd.ie | Location Map(opens in a new window)

UCD Philosophy is ranked among the Top 100 Departments of Philosophy worldwide (QS World University Rankings 2017, 2018, 2021, 2023–2025)