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The Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford will host a five year Project in ancient metaphysics, to commence in 2011.  The Project is supported by a grant of £1m, awarded by the European Research Council to Dr Anna Marmodoro, who will be the Project director.The project will involve several postdoctoral positions and a DPhil studentship: further information and advertisements for these positions will be available from the Oxford Philosophy Faculty website in due course.  The first two postdoctoral positions to be advertised will require specialization in Plato and in the Presocratics, respectively.  The positions are likely to be advertised in September, 2010, or soon after that; and it is hoped that the appointments will be made within 2010.  The successful candidates will be required to be in post in October, 2011.The title of the project is Power structuralism in ancient ontologies.The project aims to bring about a paradigm shift in our understanding of how the ancients conceived of the universe and its contents, over a period of nine centuries, 600 BC to 300 AD. The driving research hypothesis is that the sole elementary building blocks of nearly all ancient ontologies are powers, from which all there is in the universe is built. Powers are ontologically dependent properties, which are essentially directed towards an end (e.g. the power to heat); thus a world of powers is structured in a web of ontological dependencies. Such ontologies underlie object-metaphysics or process-metaphysics, and worlds of being and becoming, supplying power structures from which objects and processes are derived.Informal inquiries to: Anna Marmodoro at anna.marmodoro@philosophy.ox.ac.uk