Rate My Professor Anik Waldow

Anik Waldow is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She specializes in early modern philosophy, with particular attention to the works of Hume, Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, Herder, and Condillac. Her research examines the relationship between affect and reason in early modern conceptions of agency, highlighting how human beings, as embodied entities within the deterministic sphere of nature, exercise self-determination in thought and action. Waldow explores the moral and epistemological dimensions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century skepticism, theories of personal identity, the role of affect in self-formation, associationist accounts of thought and language, and the function of sympathy in moral cognition. She investigates emotions' contributions to knowledge communication and the cultivation of judicious minds, connecting French Enlightenment debates on eloquence to the sympathetic transmission of thoughts and feelings essential for effective intersubjective exchange.

Waldow has advanced through academic ranks at the University of Sydney, from Lecturer to Professor, and previously served as a Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry. She held an Associate Investigator position in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2013-2017), received a Leverhulme Trust research grant (2014-2016) for the interdisciplinary project 'Sympathy and its Reflections in History,' and secured ARC Discovery grants including DP1094247 and DP170102670 for investigations into the experimental self and embodied experience. In 2022, she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 2023, she won the Australasian Association of Philosophy's Annette Baier Prize. Her major publications include the monograph Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature (2020), Triggers of Thought: Impressions within Hume's Theory of Mind (2010), and the edited collection Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Nature and Norms in Thought (2013). Recent contributions feature 'The art of thinking as an intersubjective practice: Eloquence, affect, and sympathy' (2024, European Journal of Philosophy) and 'Rethinking the Human Animal with Condillac and Herder' (2023). With over 50 publications and citations exceeding 238, Waldow influences scholarship on embodied cognition, empathy, and human abilities in early modern contexts, while delivering lectures on these themes.