Víctor Fernández Castro – Juan de la Cierva Incorporación Postdoc Researcher
I am a philosopher of mind and cognitive sciences appointed in the Philosophy Department I and the Filo-Lab Unit at the University of Granada thanks to a Juan de la Cierva Incorporacion research contract from the Spanish Ministry of Sciences and Innovation. Also, I am the principal investigator of two projects: “The Social Roots of Mental Disorders” as part of the Leonardo Fellowship funded by BBVA Foundation and the project “The Social Roots of Mental Health” (PID2021-126826NA-I00) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Sciences and Innovation.
My research interest concentrates on philosophy of psychology and cognitive sciences and their applications in areas as diverse as social robotics, mental disorders or social philosophy.
A lot of my research has been concerned with how people shape each other minds (and their own) according to norms and cultural rules and how they use folk psychological concepts like belief and desire to evaluate, rationalize or blame actions when they conflict with such norms and rules. At the same time, I have dealt with other normative and affective concepts such as commitment or need to belong and the role they play in understanding joint actions both between humans and with social robots.
Before my current position, I was a Postdoc Researcher at the Institut Jean Nicod (ENS, París) and the LAAS-CNRS (Toulouse) where I had the pleasure to work under the supervision of Elisabeth Pacherie . This position was funded by the ANR project “Joint Action for Human-Robot Interaction” which attempted to identify the elements that allow the establishment and maintenance of mutual understanding between humans and robots in collaborative tasks.
During the year 2017-2018, I was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Granada, where I also obtained my Ph.D in with the thesis “Talking the Way to Other Minds: Assessment, Conversation and Folk Psychology” under the supervision of Fernando Martínez-Manrique and Agustín Vicente. Before that, I got a MA in Cognitive Science and Language from the University of Barcelona, a MA in Logic and Philosophy of Sciences from the University of Santiago de Compostela and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Granada.
I have spent research periods at the Philosophy department at George Washington University and the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, where I was supervised by Tadeusz Zawidzki and Andy Clark
Some cool people I collaborate with: Manuel Almagro Holgado, Kathleen Belhassein, David Bordonaba-Plou, Aurelie Clodic, Raul Hakli, Manuel Heras-Escribano, Pablo Lopez-Silva, Fernando Martínez-Manrique, Amandine Mayima, Miguel Nuñez de Prado, Elisabeth Pacherie, Eduardo Pérez Navarro, Neftalí Villanueva Fernández.
Víctor Fernández Castro 