Associate Professor, Philosophy
she/her/hers
Michaela McSweeney is associate professor of Philosophy at BU. Her research spans many different areas of philosophy, including epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of logic, philosophy of psychiatry/mental health, feminist philosophy, social philosophy, and aesthetics. She is fundamentally most interested in how humans can (or cannot) understand that which there is a barrier to understanding. In the interpersonal/social realm, that is mostly about how we attempt to understand each other’s first-personal experience, what the boundaries of what is possible there is, and when it is problematic. In metaphysics and the philosophy of logic, it is mostly about how we attempt to understand parts of the world that aren’t immediately accessible to us (e.g. fundamental logical structure, or abstract properties). She is currently writing a series of papers about grasping–what it is to grasp and how it can help us with epistemology (including feminist epistemology), a paper about trauma, and a paper about how we understand the world through drawing it.
Michaela has a very old and large rabbit named Donkey/Larrington/Don Quixote.