Juliette Vazard

(she/her)

• BA (Philosophy), Paris-Sorbonne IV
• BA (Clinical Psychology), Paris VIII Sorbonne (remote program)
• MSc (Philosophy of Mental Disorder), King’s College London
• PhD (Philosophy), Institut Jean Nicod, École Normale Supérieure & University of Geneva

Juliette graduated both in Philosophy (Paris IV Sorbonne) and in Cognitive Psychology (Paris VIII Sorbonne). She wrote her PhD thesis jointly at the Institut Jean Nicod for Philosophy and Cognitive Science (France), and at the Interdisciplinary Center for Affective Science in Geneva (Switzerland), including a year as a visiting fellow at the New York University Philosophy Department. Her research has appeared in journals such as Mind & Language, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Philosophical Explorations, Philosophical Psychology, and Philosophy, Psychology, & Psychiatry. Together with Charlie Kurth (Western Michigan University), she has recently co-edited a collection for the journal Synthese, titled Worry and Wellbeing: Understanding the Nature, Value, and Challenges of Anxiety.

In her dissertation, “The Anxious Inquirer: Emotions and Epistemic Uncertainty,” she developed a revisionary account of the philosophical picture of doubt. Moving away from a cartesian framework in which doubt emerges from reflecting on one’s beliefs, she puts forward a model of the cognitive and affective architecture of everyday doubt in which affective states like anxiety play a central role in explaining our sensitivity to pragmatic factors in inquiry. Her model allows her to defend normative claims about the kind of epistemic agency involved when we suspend judgement, question our beliefs, and gather new evidence. It also helps explain how our everyday (un)reasonable doubts differ from the persistent doubts of individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).

In her postdoctoral work working with Jennifer Nagel at the University of Toronto, Juliette focuses on the role of anticipatory emotions in our apprehension of future possibilities and their value for us. She is particularly interested in defining the ways in which these emotions help us rationally apprehend and navigate risk by signaling which uncertain possibilities are worth entertaining, deploying in our imagination and taking into account in our practical reasoning. She has already published results from this research in Erkenntnis and Mind & Language.

Check out her personal website to learn more about Juliette’s work.