Dorothea Debus

From 1 April 2019 until 30 September 2024 Dorothea Debus was a professor at the University of Konstanz. On 1st October 2024 she moved to the University of Erlangen where she now leads the Chair in Theoretical Philosophy.

I grew up in Speyer (on the Rhine, in Germany), and as an undergraduate I studied in Munich (MA, LMU Munich 1998); I then moved to the UK for my graduate studies, obtaining a BPhil (2000) and a DPhil (2004) from the University of Oxford. From 2004 to 2007 I worked as a Supernumerary Teaching Fellow at St. John's College, Oxford, and from October 2007 until March 2019 I was first a Lecturer, later a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York. In April 2019 I joined the Philosophy Department at the University of Konstanz, where I now work as a Professor of Theoretical Philosophy. I retain a link to my old department as an Honorary Visiting Professor in Philosophy at the University of York.

My main area of research is the Philosophy of Mind: A substantial part of my published work is concerned with the mental phenomenon of memory; but I have also written on various other mental phenomena – the imagination, attention, perception and the emotions. More recently my research has focused on a more general feature of our mental lives, namely the fact that we sometimes can be, and often also are, actively involved with how our own mental lives develop; I ask how we might possibly account for this ability, and explore its axiological implications. This project bears the working title 'Shaping Our Mental Lives', and some of its core ideas are introduced in Debus (2016-c) and Debus (2020) (see 'Publications' below).