Barbara Montero

Barbara Montero is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Her research concerns two notions of “body”: body as the physical or material substance of the world, and body as the moving, breathing, flesh and blood instrument we use when we run, walk, dance, or play. One side of this bifurcation comprises her work on physicalism, dualism, and naturalism, topics woven into her Guggenheim Fellowship research on “actual-world metaphysics”—metaphysics focusing on what the world is actually like rather than what is hypothetically possible. The other side comprises her work on proprioception, aesthetics, and the role of consciousness in expert action, the latter of which is the focus of her 2016 book Thought in Action: Expertise and the Conscious Mind and, in collaboration with psychologists John Toner (first author) and Aidan Moran, her 2022 book, Continuous Improvement: Intertwining Mind and Body in Athletic Expertise. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Society for Aesthetics, the New York University Center for Ballet and the Arts, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and the University of Cambridge New Directions in the Study of Mind Initiative.