Barbara Montero

Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame

Barbara Montero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Her research concerns two notions of “body”: body as the physical or material substance of the world, and body as the moving, breathing, flesh and blood instrument we use when we run, walk, dance, or play. One side of this bifurcation comprises her work on physicalism, dualism, and naturalism, topics woven into her Guggenheim Fellowship research on “actual-world metaphysics”—metaphysics focusing on what the world is actually like rather than what is hypothetically possible. The other side comprises her work on proprioception, aesthetics, and the role of consciousness in expert action, the latter of which is the focus of her 2016 book Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind and, in collaboration with psychologists John Toner (first author) and Aidan Moran, her 2022 book, Continuous Improvement: Intertwining Mind and Body in Athletic Expertise.

Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Society for Aesthetics, the New York University Center for Ballet and the Arts, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the University of Cambridge New Directions in the Study of Mind Initiative.

Participant In:

Mind Matters: Past, Present, and Future

Saturday, February 10th, 2018, 2:30pm

Past Event

From Xenophanes’ 6th c. BCE theory of divine intellection imbuing, comprehending, and organizing the cosmos, through Nicholas of Cusa’s 15th c. definition of mind as “the limit and measure of all things,” through Hume and his Enlightenment kin’s aspiration to be the “Newton of the mind,” to the naturalized explanations of contemporary cognitive science, Western… read more »

Come Out Wherever You Are: In Search of Consciousness

September 21st, 2024 at 2:30PM

Past Event

Panpsychism is the lightly subscribed philosophical position that consciousness is a property of all matter, large and small, simple and complex, alive and inert. According to panpsychism mind is everywhere.  Eliminativism is the view that consciousness, at least what most of us consider our mind’s eye access to reality (phenomenal consciousness), exists quite literally nowhere, not even… read more »