Nicole Note

Nicole Note (1959) is a researcher at CLEA. She studied Languages and Cultures of Indian America in Leiden, the Netherlands, worked for over 10 years in the NGO-sector (partly as a researcher) and decided to take up studies again when her children were older. Nicole successfully defended her PhD in 2007 on "Western Worldview, Meaningfulness, Self-Understanding and Understanding the Aymara-Chilean Other" with Cum Laude. She has received twice a postdoctoral grant from the FWO (2009-2012 and 2012-2015), this enabling her to passionately continue her research at the moment.

Her main orientation has turned towards Meaning in life. In a pioneering way, she approaches this subject from the outlook of our proneness to being moved and its ineffable directive force. She concentrates on the pattern of how sense works (2008). For some time she tried to merge the broader topic of meaning in life with the domain of Environmental Ethics (2009, 2013a). Lately, she started taking into account a continental mode of philosophizing that provides ‘difference’ a philosophical privilege (2013c) and attempts to contribute from this stance to a deeper understanding of meaning in life, e.g. by reconsidering descriptions as conceived of by today’s leading contemporary analytic-oriented philosophers (2010).