Victoria McGeer

Research Scholar, Princeton University

Victoria McGeer is a research scholar and lecturer at Princeton University. She took her B.A. in Philosophy and Government at Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She specializes in the philosophy of language and more prominently in the philosophy of mind.

In 1992, she took up a position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, but took leave of absence shortly thereafter in order to do further postdoctoral work in Alison Gopnik’s developmental psychology laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley (funded under an award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada).

McGeer decided to leave her teaching position at Vanderbilt in 1998 in order to pursue further interdisciplinary work as an independent scholar, and in 2000 was appointed as a Senior Member of the McDonnell Project on Philosophy and the Neurosciences (led by Professor Kathleen Akins). In 2004 she was appointed Research Scholar at the University Center for Human Values and Lecturer in the Dept. of Philosophy at Princeton University, receiving tenure in 2007.

All Videos

Against the Odds: Why We All Live for a Future We Can’t Control

Living in the moment is an exception, not the rule. So why do we invest so much energy into a future we can’t predict, control, or anticipate? It turns out our happiness may depend on it.

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3 min

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with

Victoria McGeer

Neuropsych

Hope Isn’t Blind: It’s a Way to Build Trust and Manage Anxiety

Some anxieties are essential, and for millennia they kept our ancestors alive. But there’s another type of anxiety that we can actually do away with—and it’s defeated via hope.

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3 min

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with

Victoria McGeer