Research/Areas of Interest

Moral philosophy, practical rationality, moral psychology, action theory

Education

  • PhD in Philosophy, University of Michigan–Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, United States, 1993
  • BA in Philosophy, University of Washington, Seattle, United States, 1982

Biography

Sigrún Svavarsdóttir received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1993. Her research focuses mainly on issues within metaethics: moral motivation, objectivity in ethics, evaluative concepts, evaluative attitudes, practical rationality, and personal integrity. Her papers are published in The Philosophical Review, The Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Issues, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and various anthologies. Her dissertation Thinking in Moral Terms is published in the series Dissertations in Ethics, edited by Robert Nozick.

She has been a Visiting Fellow at ANU; the National Humanities Center; the Institute for Advanced Studies at Hebrew University; and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton. She has organized international conferences in ethics in Dubrovnik, Croatia, and Reykjavík, Iceland. She is on the editorial board of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

She has been a faculty member at NYU and OSU as well as a visiting faculty at the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard University. Besides giving courses and seminars in metaethics, she has taught normative ethics, food ethics, political philosophy, Hume's practical philosophy, action theory, and theories of objectivity.

Her summer residency is in Reykjavík, Iceland, where she was born and raised. She spends much of her time on philosophical inquiry but also enjoys, in a careless manner, the arts and the outdoors.