1. Let's start from the beginning. How did you get interested in philosophy? Tell us about the path you followed to arrive where you are now.
BV: I fell in love with philosophy as a teenager. I was a bookworm and read everything I could get my hands on; at some point I got a book on the histo-ry of philosophy, and I was hooked. I loved the ancient Greeks (Plato and the Pre-Socratics mostly) and the 19th century (Nietzsche and Kierkegaard). When I went to university to study philosophy, I thought that's what I would be doing. But then I took a class on contemporary metaphysics, and one on logic, and fell in love all over again. I started my university educa-tion at a small university in the south of Germany, close to where I grew up. I don't come from an academic family, and there was no one to tell me where else to go. But I was very lucky, in my very first year, to have a teacher who told me to apply to Oxford. I did, and after two years in Ger-many I went there as an exchange student, then stayed on to do the BPhil (the Master's degree in philosophy) and a PhD. Without that advice from my teacher I don't think I would be where I am now. When I first went to Oxford, I thought I wouldn't be able to come back to Germany. Academia there seemed a rather closed circle. Fortunately, by the time I'd finished my PhD (in 2010), this had changed dramatically. Having done my PhD in Ox-ford was a huge advantage in getting a position in Germany. Apart from a short stint back in the south of Germany, I've been teaching in Berlin (first at Humboldt-University, now at the Free University) since 2010, and I think it's a wonderful place to do philosophy.
Interviste
Conversation with Barbara Vetter
di Giulia Casini
31.01.2019
Barbara Vetter è Professoressa di Theoretical Philosophy alla Freie Universität Berlin. In precedenza, ha insegnato alla Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin e alla Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen e ha conseguito un BPhil e un DPhil presso la Oxford University. Barbara Vetter è autrice di Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality (Oxford University Press, 2015), co-editrice di Dispositionen: Texte aus der zeitgenössischen Debatte (in collaborazione con Stephan Schmid, Suhrkamp, 2014) e ha pubblicato vari articoli sulle disposizioni, sulla modalità, sulle abilità e i relativi problemi legati alla metafisica, alla semantica e alla filosofia della scienza. La maggior parte del suo lavoro si concentra sullo sviluppo e la difesa di un approccio alla modalità basato sulle disposizioni. In questa intervista, Vetter spiega come ha iniziato a interessarsi alla filosofia e alla metafisica della modalità nello specifico. Parla anche del suo libro Potentiality, rispondendo ad alcune domande sulle disposizioni, la potenzialità e i mondi possibili, concludendo con delle riflessioni sul ruolo delle filosofe donne in metafisica.
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