Congratulations to Sara Aronowitz who has just been awarded a Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC). She is one of 21 new Canada Research Chairs at the University of Toronto and the only new CRC in the Faculty of Arts & Science.
Sara’s new chair is the Canada Research Chair in Philosophy of Learning and Memory. In the next five years, she plans to investigate questions about how we process and arrange information in ways that make it accessible to us later. Her research program combines philosophical and psychological methods to ask fundamental questions about learning and memory. Five leading questions driving her approach are: (1) How is human memory connected to our values? (2) Is there a distinctive skill to un-learning and re-learning? (3) To what extent does conceptual thought rely on cognitive structures that are specialized for spatial cognition? (4) What does it mean to say a machine understands? (5) How can we learn to divide up possibilities in a successful way in planning? These questions are united by a focus on how the structures we use to store information in memory are meaningful beyond just convenience.
As an emerging leader trained in both philosophy and psychology, her unique interdisciplinary background makes her ideally prepared to pursue her ambitious research agenda as Canada Research Chair. The Department of Philosophy is excited to have Sara as holder of this new CRC and is looking forward as her project comes to fruition.