RTG Fellow: Prof. Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa, Iowa)
In November/December 2019, Prof. Carrie Figdor from the University of Iowa will be visiting the RTG in Bochum.
Carrie Figdor currently works as Professor at the Department of Philosophy and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences of the University of Iowa. Additionally she is a member of the Iowa Neuroscience Institute. Before, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa from 2007-2013 and Associate Professor from 2013-2018, and as Visiting Assistant Professor at Duke University (2012) and Claremont McKenna College (2005-2007). In 2005, she obtained her PhD at the City University of New York Graduate Center. She is currently an Anderson Fellow at the University of Sydney and will be taking up the American Philosophical Association’s Edinburgh Fellowship in Edinburgh in spring 2020.
Prof. Figdor‘s primary areas of research are in Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science, as well as Metaphysics of Mind from an empirically-informed perspective. Her current research focuses on the use of psychological terms throughout biology. As significant contribution to this research topic she published her monograph Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates in 2018 with Oxford University Press. In this book, she defends a view called “Literalism”, which holds that the use of psychological predicates in biology are literal, i.e., with the same reference across human and nonhuman domains.
During her research visit, Prof. Figdor will present her work, join work-in-progress discussions with the RTG’s PhD-students, and she will be a keynote speaker at the conference “Mental Representations in a Mechanical World” organized by Matej Kohár and Beate Krickel (visit: www.meta4e.com/workshop). Also, an “author-meets-critics” symposium is planned where we will discuss her recent book. Updates regarding this event can soon be found on this website.
Prof. Figdor’s university website: https://clas.uiowa.edu/philosophy/people/carrie-figdor