New Colleagues in Department of Philosophy

M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez and Simon Barker have taken up the positions of visiting lecturer in philosophy on the 1st of September, 2020.

M. Jimena Clavel Vázquez undertook her doctoral studies at the joint graduate programme of the universities of St Andrews and Stirling, Scotland, where she’ll soon defend her thesis. Her work is located at the intersection of the philosophy of cognitive sciences, philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, and phenomenology. She also has interests in philosophy of imagination and aesthetics. For her PhD thesis, she wrote on the notion of embodiment within the sensorimotor approach to perception. She has published on the naturalization of phenomenology, and on the plausibility of a predictive approach to the sensorimotor approach to perception. In addition to this, she is currently working on a project that explores the idea that imagination is embodied, and the consequences of this embodied approach for empathy and for our engagement with fiction.

Simon Barker completed his PhD in philosophy at The University of Sheffield in 2020, under the supervision of Prof. Paul Faulkner, Prof. Miranda Fricker, and Dr T. Ryan Byerly. His research interests are in social epistemology with particular interest in the relationship between epistemic practices, social justice, and mental health. In his dissertation, Simon developed the idea that there is an affective mode of intellectual self-trust, the availability of which is key to determining the appropriate response to peer and deep disagreements. He has also published upon the place of dissent in collective inquiry and the fraught, and potentially harmful, relationship between epistemic self-trust and principled accounts of disagreement. Additionally, Simon co-edited a special issue of the journal Philosophy on the topic of ‘Harms and Wrongs in Epistemic Practice’, with Cambridge University Press. In Tartu, he will be exploring the relationship between epistemic self-trust, academia, and mental health.

These visiting lectureships are supported by the University of Tartu ASTRA Project PER ASPERA, financed by the European Regional Development Fund.

Karin Kustassoo has taken up the position of Research Fellow of History of Philosophy in Department of Philosophy on the 1st of September, 2020.

Karin obtained her PhD in Philosophy at Leiden University (the Netherlands) in 2018 with a dissertation that concentrates on Søren Kierkegaard’s place in Martin Heidegger’s first Freiburg period lecture courses. Previously, she has researched the philosophy of young Heidegger and of Kierkegaard also at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), at the Protestant Theological University (Kampen, the Netherlands), and at the University of Tartu (Estonia).

In Tartu she will be continuing her research on young Heidegger’s philosophy with the examination of the conditions of disagreement and with an attempt to apply his phenomenology to the search for the possibility of agreement between different monotheistic religions.

Funding is provided by the European Regional Development Fund and the programme Mobilitas Pluss (MOBJD650).