Virginia Ballesteros

Assistant Professor

University of Valencia

About me


I am an Assistant Professor in the Departament of Philosophy at the University of Valencia (Spain). My research focuses on the philosophy of psychiatry. I am also interested in the philosophy of psychedelics and, more generally, in altered states of consciousness. I am a member of the research projects "The Social Roots of Mental Health: Agency and Normativity", "Epistemic and Espeech Injustices", "Normative Limits of Our World View: Revisionist Projects on Communication, Knowledge and Agency" and "Know Yourself: The Importance, the Nature, and the Applications of Introspective Self-Knowledg". I am also a member of the VLC Philosophy Lab.

Previously, I worked as a Margarita Salas Fellow in the Department of Philosophy I at the University of Granada (2022-2023), and as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Logic and Theoretical Philosophy at the Complutense University of Madrid (2021-2022), where I did research on the philosophy of birth. I also held a Predoctoral Researcher position in the Philosophy Departament at the University of Valencia (2016-2019), where I obtained my PhD in Philosophy, with a dissertation entitled Conceptions of Mental Illness: in Search of Reality.

Research Interests

Philosophy of Psychiatry
  • Conceptions of mental illness
  • Self-illness ambiguity
  • Phenomenology of depression
(Social) Epistemology
  • Epistemic injustice
  • Social constructionism
  • Self-knowledge
Altered States of Consciousness
  • Philosophy of psychedelic therapy
  • Phenomenology of ASCs
  • Psychedelics as enhancers

Publications

Work in Progress

  • A reframing of autism as a form of life.
  • An analysis of the conception of psychedelics as introspection enhancers.
  • An analysis of the biopsychiatric theoretical conception of mental illness as a source of epistemic injustice.