Speakers Profile - Dr Caroline West










Travels From:
Sydney

Fee Range: E


Dr Caroline West is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. She received her PhD in philosophy from The Australian National University in 1997. She lectured at Monash University and Macquarie University, before joining the Department in 2002.

Her main areas of teaching and research interest are in metaphysics (especially personal identity); ethics; political philosophy; philosophy and psychology of well-being; applied ethics and political philosophy (including bioethics, corporate social responsibility, free speech, institutional design and wellbeing); and feminist philosophy.

She has published in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Journal of Political Philosophy, Canadian Journal of Philosophy and the Journal of Value Inquiry. She is author of the entry on "Pornography and Censorship" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Among other projects, she has written a book on Happiness.
Here is a brief synopsis:

We all want to be happy and to live a worthwhile life. But exactly what is happiness? Why should we want it? And how do we get it? This book sets out to answer these questions, combining philosophical analysis of the nature and value of happiness with current scientific research into the sources of happiness to illuminate how happiness may best be achieved.

She is a member of the Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy; and is currently also Media Officer for the Association.

She currently holds an ARC Discovery grant (with David Braddon-Mitchell, Uriah Kriegel and Adina Roskies) for a project on Personal Identity, Consciouness and Agency.