Nicole van Voorst Vader-Bours

PhD Student Practical Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Contact details

Nicole M. van Voorst Vader-Bours
PhD Student Practical Philosophy

Department of Philosophy
Woudestein - Burgemeester Oudlaan 50
Room H4-27
Rotterdam

010-4081415
vanvoorstvader@fwb.eur.nl

Short CV

• 1981: Masters International Law (Drs.) - Leiden University
• 1981-1987: Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Asylum Section
• 1987-2008: Active in Bilingual Education (while expatriate in Middle East, Far East, US and UK)
• 2008: MA Philosophy - University of Aberdeen

More information on my extended CV.

Current job: PhD student

From 1 January 2009 onwards I work as a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam (The Netherlands) within Maureen Sie's VIDI-project titled "Conscious Control, Deliberative Awareness, and Moral Agency". This project aims to think through the implications of the paradigm of adaptive unconsciousness in social and moral psychology for philosophical conceptualizations

My own project title

Operative Unconscious Prejudices - Reflections on the Normative Implications of Research in the Behavioral, Cognitive and Neurosciences and in Linguistics

My research question

Can a narrative account of personhood accommodate the ascription of moral responsibility to agents for acts they performed without prior conscious deliberation?

Courses, summer schools & workshops

• Recently attended
  • July 2009: Aspects of Responsibility (CEU Budapest, Hungary)
  • September 2009: The Social Self (SEI Alghero, Italy)
  • September-December 2009: Ethics and the Empirical Sciences (OZSE- Netherlands Research School for Practical Philosophy, Utrecht & Amsterdam)
  • February 2010: Master class on James Griffin's On Human Rights (OZSE, Amsterdam)
• Soon to attend
  • March 2010: Philosophical Implications of Empirically Informed Ethics (University of Zürich)

Philosophical Interests

• Personhood & limits of rationality
• Social interaction - 2nd personal nature
• Responsibility (including collective & role responsibility), agency & control
• Narrative and self-narrative
• Empathy & moral luck

General Interests

• Human rights, esp. freedom of speech
• Interaction between language & culture
• Bilingualism and bilingual education
• Ethics & aesthetics
• Paradox of fiction