Katalin Farkas was born and educated in Budapest, Hungary. She earned her doctoral degree in philosophy at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. After a few years of teaching at the Eotvos Lorand University, she joined the Central European University in 2000. She served as provost and academic pro-rector of CEU between 2010 and 2014. In 2012, she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.

Katalin’s main areas of research are the philosophy of mind and epistemology.In her previous work, she defended an uncompromising “internalist” conception of the mind: the thesis the mind is autonomous, and does not constitutively depend on the world. She has great admiration for Descartes, and hopes to make a modest contribution to restoring his reputation after a century or so of bad press.

In recent years, she has been working on the nature of perceptual experiences, and on the nature of knowledge and belief, where she hopes to combine a philosophical investigation about the phenomenal character of experiences with a study of empirical results from the psychology.