Awards

Titled Professor - 2022 - 2023

Mahlon Powell Professor

Titled Professor - 2020 - 2021

Oscar R. Ewing Professor

About Vera Flocke

Vera Flocke earned her B.A. in political science from Freie Universtat Berlin in 2008 and her M.Litt in philosophy from the Universities of St. Andrews and Stirling in 2011. She completed her M.A. in philosophy at Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin in 2012 and her Ph.D. in philosophy at New York University in 2019. Flocke joined the Indiana University (IU) faculty in 2019 as an acting assistant professor of philosophy and was soon after promoted to assistant professor.

Flocke’s research focuses on objectivity and standpoint dependence. For example, some questions cannot be answered with absolute facts, but only by adopting a standpoint. Some people think that there is no “absolute” fact regarding whether marmite is tasty; it depends on your taste (or, more generally, your standpoint). More controversially, some people argue that there is no “absolute” fact regarding whether factory farming is wrong; and some think that the answer to certain mathematical questions is standpoint-dependent. These views often seem very appealing, but they also raise puzzling questions. What is the content of a non-objective question? How can we tell whether a given question is non-objective? And how can we go about answering a non-objective question?

Flocke has authored several publications approaching these questions from a historical perspective. Her works have been published in several professional publications, including The Language of Ontology, the Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophical Studies.