drs. Nicole van Voorst Vader-Bours
Nicole van Voorst Vader-Bours (1956) works as a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy of the Erasmus University Rotterdam since January 2009. She obtained her MA International Law (Drs.) at Leiden University in 1981. Directly afterwards she started working at the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs until she left the Netherlands in1987. In the period 1987-2008 she lived as an expatriate in the Middle East, the Far East, the United States, and the United Kingdom. During this period she was occupied with bilingual education. From 2004 to 2008 van Voorst Vader studied Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen where she obtained her second MA.
Nicole van Voorst Vader’s main philosophical interests are narrativity and personhood, the boundaries of agency and their impact on the responsibility for personal and collective actions, the 2nd personal nature of social interactions, and the role of empathy and moral luck. More generally, she is interested in the interaction between language and culture
Van Voorst Vader does her research within Maureen Sie's VIDI-project titled ‘Conscious Control, Deliberative Awareness, and Moral Agency’. She aims to think through what the implications of the paradigm of adaptive unconsciousness are for our philosophical conceptualizations. Focusing on operative unconscious prejudices, she reflects on the conceptual and normative implications of recent research findings in behavioral cognitive neurosciences, especially within cognitive, social and moral psychology. The research question for her dissertation is “Can a narrative account of personhood accommodate the ascription of moral responsibility to agents for acts they performed without prior conscious deliberation?”
Nicole van Voorst Vader aims to obtain her PhD in 2013.
