Carrie Jenkins
Canada Research Chair and Professor of Philosophy | University of British Columbia
Vancover, BC, CANADA
Writer and award-winning public philosopher.
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Biography
I'm a writer and philosopher based in Vancouver, BC. I currently hold a Canada Research Chair in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. I studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, and have also held academic posts at the University of St Andrews, the Australian National University, the University of Michigan, the University of Nottingham, and the University of Aberdeen. At UBC I head up a SSHRC-funded project on The Nature of Romantic Love. My new book, What Love Is And What It Could Be, is out now with Basic Books (NY).
Industry Expertise (2)
Education/Learning
Research
Areas of Expertise (5)
Metaphysics
Philosophy of Logic
Epistemology
Philosophy of Romantic Love
Interdisciplinary Philosophy
Accomplishments (1)
American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest Award (professional)
2016-08-23
Winner 2016 American Philosophical Association Public Philosophy Op Ed Contest Award
Education (3)
Trinity College, Cambridge: Ph.D., Philosophy
Trinity College, Cambridge: M.Phil., Philosophy
Trinity College, Cambridge: B.A., Philosophy
Affiliations (1)
- University of British Columbia : Canada Research Chair
Links (3)
Media Appearances (9)
UBC Profs Organize Sexual Assault Conference Amid Scandal
The Huffington Post online
2016-02-14
Philosophy professor Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins said the conference was one of many suggestions that emerged when a group of concerned UBC faculty members met in December...
Valentine's Day advice for the single person
CBC online
2016-02-14
Ichikawa Jenkins studies the metaphysics of love at UBC. "There is this perception that we can't understand love, and that it's really mysterious. Nothing we do is going to get us any closer to figuring out what it is, and you have to let it go and not overthink it. " "Actually, we're underthinking love. If we had more of an opportunity to get into the philosophical questions, like, 'what is this thing?', 'where does it come from?'...I think that could really help people who are struggling with living up to expectations."...
Modern Love (Part 4)
CBC Radio Early Edition radio
2016-02-12
Is romance lost in the modern dating age?
She wants to know what love is
University of British Columbia online
2016-02-10
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, a Canada Research Chair in philosophy, is the brain behind the multi-year ‘The Metaphysics of Love Project.’ As part of her analytical look into passions of the heart, Jenkins is inviting the public to contribute their observations and experiences of romantic love using the Twitter hashtag #romanticloveis “Metaphysics is the inquiry into the nature of reality, what’s real and what isn’t, what’s natural and what isn’t, what’s fundamental and what isn’t,” explains the young purple-haired professor, who certainly doesn’t fit the stereotype of the bearded, brooding male thinker...
Don't mix up love with marriage
Globe and Mail online
2015-07-02
Last Friday, my social media exploded in rainbow hearts and bubbled over with messages that "love just won." #lovewins suddenly became a top trending hashtag on Twitter, because love is love, right?...
What's love got to do with sex ed? Maybe everything
Globe and Mail online
2015-05-15
Ontario schools are introducing a new sex ed curriculum this September, one that covers topics such as sexting and consent as opposed merely to the mechanics of sex. Predictably, some parents are vocally outraged...
The L-word in Sex Ed: should love be part of the lesson?
CBC radio
2015-05-14
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins, Canada Research Chair in philosophy at UBC, argues that schools should talk about love because it's something we value highly but don't understand properly...
Exploring The Metaphysics Of Love
npr online
2015-02-16
"Is love an emotion? An experience? Is it a kind of desire? Is it possible to love a fictional person? To love more than one person? Is romantic love fundamentally different from other kinds of love?"
Sense of Place
Roundhouse Radio radio
2016-12-15
Host Minelle Mahtani talks about love with Canada Research Chair and Professor Carrie Jenkins.
Articles (5)
Epistemological Naturalisms
The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism2015 One traditionally prominent kind of epistemological naturalism centers on the rejection of a priori knowledge. Its motivating idea is that the very idea of a priori knowledge is unscientific, because science is a purely empirical enterprise. Since anything that is unscientific is thereby unacceptable to a naturalist, the thought continues, epistemological naturalists must reject the a priori. Something like this line of thought has also been applied to epistemic normativity and armchair knowledge, both of which have been treated as similarly inimical ...
The traditional conception of the a priori
Synthese2015 In this paper, we explore the traditional conception of a prioricity as epistemic independence of evidence from sense experience. We investigate the fortunes of the traditional conception in the light of recent challenges by Timothy Williamson. We contend that Williamson's arguments can be resisted in various ways. En route, we argue that Williamson's views are not as distant from tradition (in particular, from Kant) as they might seem at first glance.
What Is Love? An Incomplete Map of the Metaphysics
Journal of the American Philosophical Association2015 The paper begins by surveying a range of possible views on the metaphysics of romantic love, organizing them as responses to a single question. It then outlines a position, constructionist functionalism, according to which romantic love is characterized by a functional role that is at least partly constituted by social matters (social institutions, traditions, and practices), although this role may be realized by states that are not socially constructed.
What Can We Know A Priori?
Current Controversies in Epistemology2014 Michael Devitt has been developing an influential two-pronged attack on the a priori for over thirteen years. This attack does not attempt to undermine the coherence or significance of the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori, but rather to answer the question “What can we know a priori?” with: “Nothing.”...
Serious Verbal Disputes: Ontology, Metaontology, and Analyticity
The Journal of Philosophy2014 I will be considering whether ODS is true on the assumption that recent disputes about the existence of ordinary objects are reasonably representative of “typical” ontological disputes. Although ontological disputes are many and varied, I do in fact think the dispute over the existence of ordinary objects is reasonably typical of a fairly wide class of ontological disputes (which is not to say it is representative of all of them). For that reason, I think many of the issues I discuss here are generalizable to other ontological disputes and the case of ...
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