Jessie Munton: CV

I'm an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. I'm also a fellow at St John's College, and Director of Studies for Philosophy there for the 2023-2024 academic year. 

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My core areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of psychology. I also enjoy thinking and writing about philosophy of psychiatry.  

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I'm the winner of a 2023 Philip Leverhulme Prize. I'll be using the funds from that to spend some time thinking about various philosophical aspects of forgetting over the next couple of years. Recently, I've become increasingly interested in what I think of as negative epistemology: how do we evaluate ignorance, forgetting, or the failure to undertake inquiry or collect evidence? This partly depends on our philosophy of mind: how do we model those kinds of negative epistemic space, states that are constituted by a lacuna or absence?  That interest has in turn grown out of thinking about salience and attention - the role they play in our mental lives, and in how we can evaluate them, from an epistemic perspective. For the 2022-2023 academic year I was on research leave funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, writing a book that offers a normative framework for attention and salience. The book is under contract with OUP and I'm circulating a draft - email me if you're interested in having a look. 

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Some of my existing research is in philosophy of perception. I'm currently working on a paper that argues that visual objects are bundles of modal properties. In the past I've written about the ways in which visual experience extends through and develops over time, and about perceptual uncertainty. I also work on bias: when is something a bias, and when is it just a case of legitimately learning from experience? Must problematic biases always involve false or unjustified beliefs? What can we learn from bias about the limits of epistemic evaluation?

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I like to do philosophy by talking to other people, so if you're working on any of those questions and want to discuss them, get in touch... 

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Before coming to Cambridge in 2018 as a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, I was a Bersoff  Faculty Fellow at NYU for the 2017-2018 academic year. Before that, I completed my PhD at Yale University, and a BPhil in philosophy and a BA in classics and philosophy, both at Oxford University. I have also spent time undertaking legal training, and legal research focusing on capital punishment in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

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