Dr. Vanessa Carr

Personal information

Vanessa Carr is an Assistant Professor (Akademische Rätin) at the Chair of Philosophy and Decision Theory at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at LMU. She was previously a Junior Fellow at FU Berlin (2020 - 2021) as part of the Human Abilities research group, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Leipzig University (2018 - 2019). In summer semester 2024, she has a research residency at the Center for Advanced Studies, LMU.

Vanessa is also currently a deputy women's representative for the LMU Faculty of Philosophy, Philosophy of Science and Religious Studies. In this capacity, she can be confidentially contacted by students and members of staff about any matter of harassment or discrimination.

Research interests

Her research generally concerns the nature of intentional action, and the distinctive form of control that we have when we act intentionally. Her PhD, and later work building on this research, focused on the role of causation in an account of intentional agency, addressing a wide-range of action-kinds, including the creation and change of abstract artworks. She is now also working on other aspects of intentional agency, such as the relationship between our means and our ends, the knowledge of what we are doing and how to do it, and the rationality of our beliefs about what we intend to do.

Other agency-related topics that Vanessa is interested in include practical reason and rationality, willpower, the sense of agency, mental action, collective action, and social practices. More broadly, Vanessa is interested in moral psychology, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy.

Selected publications

• Carr, V.: Created, Changeable, and Yet Acausal? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 119(3): 325-334 (2019).
• Carr, V.: Causality, Determination and Necessitation in Free Human Action. Synthese 200(4): 1-28 (2022).