Catherine Wilson

Catherine Wilson

Anniversary Professor of Philosophy at University of York. She was Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, and before that was a Professor at CUNY Graduate School.  Her main areas of research are Early Modern Philosophy, about which she has written several books (most recently ‘Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity’ OUP, 2008), and Ethics, about which she has written a book (‘Moral Animals’, OUP, 2007).  Catherine Wilson has also written some recent research papers (e.g. PAS 2010) defending a naturalistic moral cognitivism.

Visit Catherine Wilson’s website here. An overview of her publications can be found here.

Presentation:

Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities: Mach’s Empiricism and the Episodic and Narrative Self
Wednesday 20 February 2013
16:00-18:00 at Senate House 261

The Austrian writer Robert Musil, author of the great but still little read trilogy, The Man without Qualities, obtained his PhD in in early 20th century Berlin with a thesis on Ernst Mach’s empiricistic philosophy of science. The paper will discuss Mach’s contribution to literary modernism and to the notion of the fragmentation of the self, a notion that has resurfaced in recent debates over the importance –or unimportance –of narrative continuity to selfhood.