Victoria McGeer

Biography

Victoria McGeer is a Senior Research Scholar in the Center for Human Values at Princeton University. From 2013, she began to spend a part of each year at the Australian National University, where she is currently appointed as a Professor of Philosophy. Her published work reflects her wide range of interests encompassing topics in moral psychology, the development of agential capacities and its impairments, responsibility, the nature of folk-psychological explanation, problems of self-knowledge, and the metaphysics of mind. Her paper, ‘Mindmaking practices: the social infrastructure of self-knowing agency and responsibility’, was selected for inclusion in The Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best philosophy articles in 2015.

McGeer received her B.A. in Government and Philosophy from Dartmouth College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. In 1993, as an Assistant Professor in the philosophy department at Vanderbilt University, she won the Royal Society of Canada’s Alice Wilson Award for postdoctoral research. With support from the Canadian government, she took special research leave to explore how developmental questions affect theoretical work in philosophy of mind and moral psychology, and spent two years at the lab of developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik at the University of California, Berkeley. After leaving Vanderbilt to pursue an interdisciplinary research program on the development of social cognition and its disorders, she became a senior member of the McDonnell Project in Philosophy and the Neurosciences in 2001. McGeer joined the Center for Human Values at Princeton in 2004, where she was granted tenure in 2008.