Carol Rovane

Carol Rovane is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Philosophy Department, and was recently awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.  She publishes widely in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action and ethics, and has authored two books:  The Bounds of Agency:  An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, and The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism.  An abiding theme of her work concerns the very idea and nature of a point of view.  Every form of subjectivity requires some notion of a subjective point of view.  But this is not just one thing.  For example, the bodily point of view from which we perceive and move is not necessarily the same thing as the phenomenological point of view from which there is something it is like to feel our sensations, or the rational point of view from which we deliberate and act and regard ourselves as possessing freedom.  No matter how we conceive a point of view, there are serious and puzzling issues concerning how to construe the subjective in relation to the objective, as well as subjects in relation to one another — or in other words, mind-world relations and mind-mind relations.