Dr. Vanessa Carr

Vanessa Carr is an Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin) at the Chair of Philosophy and Decision Theory at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU. She was previously a Junior Fellow at FU Berlin, as part of the Human Abilities research group, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Universität Leipzig, as part of their Humboldt project on connections between analytic philosophy and German idealism. Her research concerns the nature of intentional action, spanning such issues as the role of causation in an account of what intentional action is, the relationship between our means and our ends, the nature of our knowledge of what we do intentionally, and the rationality of our beliefs about what we intend to do.

Project at CAS

During her residency, Vanessa will investigate the notion of distinctively practical representation: a form of cognitive representation of kinds of actions that enables one to perform actions of those kinds, without necessarily being able to articulate the precise nature of the action-kinds. She plans to develop a more complete account of what practical representation amounts to, and of its role in (a) the knowledge involved in intentional and skilful action, (b) practical reasoning, and (c) control in action. She will run a workshop on the topic featuring talks from visiting researchers Dr. Carlotta Pavese (Cornell University) and Dr. Antonia Peacocke (Stanford University), as well as Gabriele Ferretti (Ruhr-University Bochum), Sophie Kikkert (LMU), and Silvano Zipoli Caiani (University of Florence).