Iowa’s Carrie Figdor Is Awarded the APA Edinburgh Fellowship

The American Philosophical Association is pleased to announce that Dr. Carrie Figdor (University of Iowa) has been awarded the 2019–2020 Edinburgh Fellowship. The Edinburgh Fellow has a private office in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh, is a member of the Institute’s lively research community, and has full borrowing rights at Edinburgh University Library.

Sara Bernstein (University of Notre Dame), who chaired the selection committee, said, “Carrie Figdor’s research on mindreading addresses some of the most fundamental questions about human minds and human interaction. Figdor’s project, a general theory of mindreading in terms of speech acts, is a perfect fit for the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. The Edinburgh Fellowship will help Figdor continue her ongoing fruitful interaction with philosophers and other researchers at the University of Edinburgh.”

Dr. Figdor holds appointments in the department of philosophy, the department of psychological and brain sciences, and the interdisciplinary graduate program in neuroscience at the University of Iowa, where she is also the director of undergraduate studies. Figdor earned her Ph.D. at CUNY Graduate Center in 2005, and her primary research areas are philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and neuroscience, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, plus neuroethics and media ethics. Her current research focuses on the use of psychological terms throughout biology, a topic at the intersection of philosophy language, mind, and science. Figdor is also working on projects in mechanistic explanation, the relation between psychology and moral status, and the epistemology of journalism.