Susanna Schellenberg

Susanna Schellenberg is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Rutgers University, where she holds a secondary appointment at the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science.^[1][2] She specializes in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language^[3][4][5] and is best known for her work on perceptual experience, evidence, capacities, mental content, and imagination. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Award, a Humboldt Prize, and a Mellon New Directions Fellowship for a project on the Neuroscience of Perception. She is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (Oxford University Press, 2018).^[6] The book won an honorable mention for the American Philosophical Association 2019 Sanders Book Prize.

Schellenberg was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and raised in Lebanon, Pakistan, and Switzerland.^[7] After having received a mathematical-scientific Matura (Typus C) from the Gymnasium Köniz-Lebermatt, Switzerland, she studied mathematics, economics, philosophy, and history at the Universität Basel, Université Paris I Panthéone-Sorbonne, Johann-Wolfgang Goethe Universität, and Oxford University.^[3][7][8] She received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh in 2007, where her thesis dealt with conceptual content and inference.^[3][9]

Schellenberg held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto from 2006 to 2008 which was curtailed when she chose to move to a postdoctoral position at the Australian National University, where she subsequently became an assistant professor in 2008, and an associate professor in 2010.^[1] Schellenberg was the first woman to hold a permanent academic appointment in Philosophy at the Australia National University's Research School of Social Sciences.^[1] In 2011, Schellenberg moved to Rutgers University.^[1] Brian Weatherson and Jonathan L. Kvanvig regarded Schellenberg's move to Rutgers as buttressing Rutgers' reputation as having one of the pre-eminent epistemology departments in the world.^[5][10]

Schellenberg's work has centered around developing a comprehensive account of the epistemological and phenomenological role of perception.^[1] Her view shows how the epistemic force of experience is grounded in employing perceptual capacities that we possess by virtue of being perceivers^[1] Schellenberg has also developed an account of the nature of perceptual content that suggests a new way to understand singular modes of presentation, arguing that perceptual experience is at root both relational and representational.^[1] In addition to her main areas of interest, Schellenberg has also written papers on topics such as inferential semantics, the philosophy of Gottlob Frege, and imagination.^[1][7] Much of Schellenberg's work to-date has focused on reconciling apparently contradictory viewpoints on topics in the philosophy of mind.^[5]

Schellenberg is the author of The Unity of Perception: Content, Consciousness, Evidence (OUP, 2018) and has published a series of articles in leading journals such as The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs, and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.^[8]

• Susanna Schellenberg on PhilPapers
• Susanna Schellenberg website