Departmental homepageProfessor Heal studied History and Philosophy at Cambridge, where she also completed her PhD. After a Research Fellowship at Newnham, she travelled to the USA with a Harkness Fellowship, visiting Princeton and Berkeley. In 1976 she became a lecturer at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, returning to Cambridge in 1986 where she became a Professor and is now an Emeritus Professor. She has served as President of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1997.
Professor Heal has written on meaning, self-knowledge, indexicality, rationality and other central topics in philosophy of mind and language, being particularly known for work exploring the role co-operative action and cognition play in underpinning our grasp of the psychological. She is currently working on the importance of the first-person plural, we/us, and how the landscape of philosophical options, for example in ethics and in philosophy of mind, would change if we acknowledged the role it has in our lives and thinking.
Fact and Meaning; Quine and Wittgenstein on the Philosophy of Language, Blackwell, 1989.
Mind, Reason and Imagination: Selected Essays in Philosophy of Mind and Language, Cambridge University Press 2003.
'Social Anti-Individualism, Co-Cognitivism and Second Person Authority', Mind 2013; 341-71.
‘Other minds, Facts and Values’, Knowing and Understanding Other Minds eds A Avramides and Matthew Parrott OUP 2019, 200-218.
