Professor Victoria McGeer elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities

AN academic career in the sciences seemed a given for Professor Tori McGeer.

Growing up with neuroscientist parents and engaging in lively scientific debates around the dinner table, Professor McGeer, from The Australian National University (ANU) School of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences, never imagined she’d go into philosophy.

Indeed, she says she very nearly avoided the subject altogether after her first class as part of her undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College.

“My first course in philosophy was so strange. I swore I would never do another!” she says. “It seemed to me a very foreign way of thinking. It didn’t help that I started with Nietzsche, a very over-the-top, dramatic philosopher. I didn't have the context or the tools to understand it at that time.”

Fortunately, she later delved back into her undergraduate philosophy studies, as recommended by a much-admired neuroscientist colleague of her parents.

Having been recently elected as a Corresponding Fellow at the Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH), Professor McGeer says she’s “pleased and delighted” at the honour.

“I’m an Australian citizen but as a relative newcomer to this country, it means a lot to me to make these connections and feel part of the whole academic world here,” she says.

Dividing her time between her role as Professor of Philosophy at the ANU School of Philosophy, and as a tenured Senior Research Fellow at the University Center for Human Values at the University of Princeton, Professor McGeer says she feels fortunate to be able to work between two “wonderful” institutions.

“I love that the School of Philosophy at ANU is quite informal, and students can talk to the staff easily," she says.

"We have a policy of meeting daily for tea, and people talk about their work or any problems they're having. It’s a very rich environment."

Professor McGeer says one of the things she appreciates about her career is having the opportunity to explore so many different fields within the scope of philosophy.

“Some specialise but I'm more of a generalist; I find myself moving from one area to another as I keep getting fascinated by different topics,” she says.

“I started in philosophy of language, then moved on to philosophy of mind. I was especially interested in how social cognition develops in children, which led to an interest in atypical social development, especially in autistic children. This in turn took me towards moral psychology more generally, focusing especially on the topics of responsibility, punishment and criminal justice.

“I love that philosophy, for me, has allowed me to move around all these different topics but in a systematic way.”

Thanks to her science-based upbringing, Professor McGeer says she’s long held an interest in the way science and philosophy interact, and that some of the work she has been most proud of is in philosophical psychology and collaborating across disciplines. 

“As philosophers, we need to be asking conceptual foundation questions which can then be taken up by the sciences and formulated in such a way that it's empirically tractable,” she says. 

“It’s satisfying to me that I've come full circle and I’m now much more engaged with science.” 

Today, Professor McGeer works on a range of topics in philosophy of mind and moral psychology, with a special interest in showing how these topics can be advanced by highlighting a distinctive feature of human agency – namely, our capacity to regulate or shape our minds in conformity with a variety of norms (rational norms, moral norms, and conventional norms of various sorts).

“Over the years, I have published a number of essays that explore our capacity for mind-shaping and how this capacity underlies a number of other features that are distinctive of human agency – for instance, our commitment to treating one another as responsible agents, as well as what it takes (cognitively and emotionally) to be such an agent.”

Professor McGeer says she’s now the one recommending that all students take a course in philosophy at some point. 

“Philosophy is an exercise of the imagination, importantly creative, but also disciplined. It’s such a great foundation for how we approach everything. It may seem a dispensable field of study, but it’s the core of writing and critical thinking,” she says. 

“I think we all need to become creative thinkers in a disciplined way, and that’s what philosophy excels at.”