Virginia Ballesteros

Researcher in Philosophy

About me


I work as a Margarita Salas Postdoctoral Researcher in the Departament of Philosophy at the University of Valencia (Spain). Currently, I am on a research stay at the Unit of Excellence FiloLab-UGR, at the University of Granada. My research project focuses on the role that experience and beliefs about the world as a whole play in depression. 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" and "Metaphysics of Biology: Processes and Dispositions".
Previously, I worked 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 — in particular, on the experience of giving birth and on some metaphysical and epistemological aspects of birth care.
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 and Ontology
  • Epistemic injustice
  • Conceptual engineering
  • Social constructionism
Altered States of Consciousness
  • Philosophy of psychedelic therapy
  • Phenomenology of ASCs
  • Psychedelic moral enhancement

Publications


French-Spanish Translations
English-Spanish Translations
  • Tejedor, Chon; Ballesteros, Virginia (trans.). Comenzando con Wittgenstein. (Original work: Tejedor, Chon. 2011. Starting with Wittgenstein. London & New York: Continuum Bloomsbury).

Work in Progress

  • A conceptual clarification of primal world beliefs.
  • An analysis of the biopsychiatric theoretical conception of mental illness as a source of epistemic injustice.
  • A Wittgensteinian framework to account for the epistemic aspects of psychedelic therapy for depression.