Curriculum Vitae#

Katalin Farkas is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Central European University and is currently serving as Provost and Academic Pro-Rector of CEU. She graduated in mathematics and philosophy at Eötvös Loránd University, and earned a PhD (1998) and subsequently a Doctor of Science degree (2010) from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She spent two years at Eötvös Loránd University as a Research Fellow of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Support Office (MTA Támogatott Kutatóhelyek Irodája). Since 2000, she has been working in the Philosophy Department at CEU, where she was head of department between 2007 and 2010. In the academic year 2008/9, she was Kerstin Hesselgren Visiting Professors at the University of Stockholm. The Hesselgren Chair was created by the Swedish Parliament to enable the Swedish Research Council to issue an annual invitation to an outstanding woman scholar from abroad to take up a visiting professorship at a Swedish university. Previous to that, Farkas had been a Junior Fellow at the Collegium Budapest, a visitor at the University of Sydney, The Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen, the RSSS at the Australian National University in Canberra.

Katalin Farkas's main area of research is the philosophy of mind, and this is the topic of her book The Subject's Point of View (Oxford University Press, 2008). She has great admiration for Descartes, and hopes to make a modest contribution to restoring his reputation after a century or so of bad press. Her present project is to develop a philosophical categorisation of all varieties of mental phenomena: this includes perceptual experiences, sensations, imagery, dreams, hallucinations, as well as beliefs, desires and character traits. She hopes to combine a philosophical investigation about the phenomenal character of experiences with a study of empirical results from the psychology.